


The Waitress

by LateMarch



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Anger, Bad Driving, Bruce isn't that kind of Doctor, Bucky Barnes Feels, Caw Caw Motherfucker, Clint pulls her out of it, Diners, Donkey Kong - Freeform, F/M, Flashbacks, Hummus, I have no idea, Kidnapping, Mental Anguish, Natasha gets possessive, Natasha likes to swear at people in russian, National Guard - Freeform, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Bucky Barnes, Rich Man Temper Tantrums, Shame, Slow Burn, The Boot, Thor didn't make this cut, Up all night to get Bucky, Waiters & Waitresses, hydra is a dick, is that a thing?, let's all live in avengers tower, man shut the hell up, maybe next time guys, melee, mentions of past violence, small back touches, super smash bros, thinly veiled marvel references, tongue depressors are a hot commodity, yes i am an erratic updater, yes i am sorry for it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-11
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-02-08 11:20:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 33,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1939080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LateMarch/pseuds/LateMarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A local radio station was on in the background, familiar yet grating, sounding like orders being repeated over and over again. There was a wad of crumpled cash in his pocket that was heavier than lead, a tick in his eyelid that wouldn’t quit, and a waitress waiting for his order.</p><p>Or, We're up all night to get Bucky Barnes, Winter Soldier (and the waitress that he may or may not have kidnapped).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i'll be your waitress this morning

**Author's Note:**

> *nervous laughter* You're funny if you think I know what this is.
> 
> Honestly, I only have the plans for a couple more chapters even though the story should stretch out longer than that. We'll see what happens -- it struck me in a moment of inspiration and searching through all of the fabulous Bucky/OC and Bucky/Darcy/Steve fics (MY LIFEBLOOD SERIOUSLY GUYZ) on this site. You're all amazing. You're all way better than me… just take pity on my poor attempt to be part of the group, please?

Somehow, the Winter Soldier ended up in a diner in Brooklyn. So if he was trying to run from his past, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

This was the kind of diner that had _maybe_ been updated once since the 1940s, and he could still pick out the details that betrayed age and history. Linoleum stained dark with heavy foot traffic no matter how hard it was scrubbed, aluminum tables, and the words “Blue Plate Special” embossed across the menu board. The waitresses wore jeans, t-shirts – modern fare – but the logo on their aprons was distinctly old-fashioned. Some deeply buried part of him had steered his feet through the front door and to a booth in the back, furthest away from the counter and by the window so he could keep an eye out for… what? The Winter Soldier wasn’t sure, entirely, but he did it anyway.

Outside it was early morning, light enough that he could be seen or spotted if someone cared enough to look, and for the first time in years, the Winter Soldier worried about detection. Decades had passed him by in a jumbled, disorganized fashion, but through all his missions he remembered the calm confidence that he could not be caught.

He blinked and there was a menu in his hands, the swaying hips of a waitress walking away and he had the strongest urge to call after her. A car backfired outside, sounding almost like the word ‘Bucky,’ being shouted by the blonde man from four days earlier, and images of painfully earnest blue eyes flashed through his mind. This man he was seeing wasn’t Bucky, he was Captain America, wasn’t he? And Bucky was…?

His head throbbed with the – memory? Winter Soldier supposed that this man and this Bucky were memories. Visiting the Smithsonian had made his head throb viciously, pain enough to match anything the Russians had done to him in seventy odd years – enough even to rival the excruciating noise and pain of metal seared to flesh. It felt like there was still electricity coursing through his brain, washing out his thoughts until they disappeared under a flood of confusion and blank, white, nothingness.

A local radio station was on in the background, familiar yet grating, sounding like orders being repeated over and over again. There was a wad of crumpled cash in his pocket that was heavier than lead, a tick in his eyelid that wouldn’t quit, and a waitress waiting for his order.

 

* * *

 

“Do you think that you know what you’re going to order?” The scruffy looking man had been sitting in June’s section for some time now, holding a menu open in front of him, unmoving. From her position next to the booth, she could see new beard growth and a frown under long, tangled hair.

He glanced up at her quickly, and she got the distinct impression that he felt uncomfortable interacting with her. “No.” The words were spoken gruffly without any eye contact.

His clothes were dark enough to disguise most damage and dirt, but June could see rips here and there – the wear of hard living becoming evident under only the most determined scrutiny. They looked well-made enough, quality, as if he’d fallen recently into some hard times, and that tugged at her heart strings. Having just dragged herself by her bootstraps out of a life of couch surfing and women’s shelters, June could empathize.

And she wanted to do something, for him. The pancake special was their Deal of the Day – the cheapest on the menu for the most food.

“I’ll get you a #1 then. Pancakes are the best here.” She found herself saying before thinking, and when he looked up, startled, and caught her in the full blast of his eyes, she remembered how often empathy had gotten her into trouble in the past.

In the back of the diner, a loud clock rang to signal that the 7 a.m. breakfast rush would be starting soon. The man flinched but it was almost as if he was practiced at finding the small clock when he looked for it – like he’d done it a million times before. As he returned to suspiciously look her over, June thought his eyes seemed dark, tragic but beautiful like a raw cliff falling into the ocean. Made her want to sit and stay a spell, as the diner’s old owner Archie often said.

They pulled in a way that was dangerous and addictive, a whirlpool that wouldn’t stop until it consumed all; and hat was a warning she needed to take well in hand. Maybe the effect would have gone on forever, but other customers behind her were calling impatiently for service, growing more and more agitated, peeling June from table thirteen and turning her back on the sad, lonely predator she’d just encountered.

When June returned and placed a white ceramic mug on the tabletop next to his gloved left hand because he looked like he needed it – not because it was included in the special. His fist curled as if he had to restrain himself from reaching out and grabbing for her. He watched suspiciously while she poured a stream of steaming coffee that just filled his cup to the rim, and asked in a low, monotone voice, “What did you put into that?”

She stared at him, puzzled, and cocked one hip to sling the carafe handle into the waistband of her apron. “Water and coffee beans? What else would go in there?”

* * *

 

The Winter Soldier stared at his full coffee cup and didn’t move to pick it up. Vaguely he could feel some thought about creamer and sugar lumps in the back of his head, but it was half-eaten away and useless, so he let it die. Instead he thought of all the things the Russians, HYDRA, had given him for sustenance over the decades. Bland, chalky things packed with protein, always with the burning aftertaste of chems meant to regulate him. Or at least that’s what they told him.

And despite all their conditioning, he’d never particularly believed them.

This woman though didn’t look too much like a HYDRA weapon –thin but without tone like it’d been a diet of necessity rather than effort. Recently though, she’d begun to fill out on a steadier diet – he could tell by the way the effects were still uneven. Her moderate breasts and hips were beginning to swell past the point were they’d fit in her worn clothes; but her red-brown hair was still dull and frazzled – not yet grown past the older chemical composition of long-term malnutrition – and her arms were still too thin on her frame.

He thought, as she looked him over with an expectant but strangely gentle eye, that if she’d been a mission, he would have gone in for a 1 on 1 kill. She was the type of person that scurried about like a mouse from one hole to the next.  Too weak to fight back and not resourceful enough to have any chance for running – her only talent was hiding. And sometimes it was just too much trouble to lure the mouse out of it’s hole.

Although, the Winter Soldier decided as he inspected the sloshing coffee in her carafe for any suspicious bubbling or coloration, that if this one had been a mark, this one would have given him some regret. And he couldn’t begin to decide why.

 

* * *

 

A low buzzing sounded from the back of the diner broke June’s concentration – someone’s order was ready – and the unshaven predator opened his mouth like he wanted to reply but was suddenly discovering that he was at a loss for words. From the flash of distress and frustration that flew across his features before he tucked it away again, June suspected this was not the first time this had happened to him.

Distracted, she noticed the radio finishing up it’s report on the Winter Soldier and the fall of the Triskelion, whatever that was. Maybe it had something to do with that building’s collapse a few days ago in D.C. – June’d caught a few minutes of news coverage here and there in between shifts. It switched to a report on American soldiers in Iraq and their hopes of coming home, and perhaps that was the answer she was looking for.

Maybe he was a veteran, she decided, noticing the red, calloused knuckles of his bare right hand and the fact that he’d picked a booth with a vantage point on the rest of the diner. Maybe he’d come back from Iraq to find his life in ruins around him, maybe he suffered from something like PTSD and had fallen to the wayside like so many others before him had. The idea that he might finally be someone she could help rather than the other way around, piqued even more sympathy and had June diving in before her brain could catch up with her mouth.

“Don’t worry. It’s on the house.” She told him, braved herself to reach out and gently pat a shoulder that was clenched and knotted under her palm, and left to surreptitiously dig through her pockets for a coffee’s worth of change.


	2. i'm sorry i'll never do it again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She didn’t know why she put down coffee on her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all, thanks for such a warm welcome so far! Here I go again with another chapter and I hope you'll like this one too -- mostly I hope that you'll see that I'm trying to convey changes in Bucky's mental state and not being a totally bad editor. Anyway, here we are with chapter 2 and two different narratives of the same incident.

Bucky sat in the back booth with his spine pressed to the wall, and waited for someone to notice him. He found himself at a loss for what was to be done, something he was becoming increasingly familiar with. He’d come in several minutes before, taken a menu from the stack on the counter. Slipped to the back of the restaurant while hugging the walls as closely as he could. But now he wanted to be seen, and that he didn’t know how to do.

He looked out at the noise of the people driving cars by; the people in the diner slurping coffee; the cook as he hit his bell to signal that an order was read and the beep of electronic keyboards as people texted. Those were the ways others gained attention, the ways others communicated. Except Bucky couldn’t do any of those things; and the Winter Soldier definitely could never have done any of that.

At most a HYDRA handler would have provided him with some basic burner phone when he needed it. But mostly the Winter Soldier had communicated face to face, whether it was taking verbal –  never written – orders, or staring down the barrel of a gun at some target. And even Bucky could figure out that none of those options would be acceptable here.

Except that waitress was coming over again, the one from the day before. He had to think hard to remember her name, June, but it eventually reminded him of some other woman from lifetimes ago who didn’t really matter. He couldn’t particularly say that this too thin June mattered either, except that she was here and the other one was not. The other June was probably dead – old age was a bitch.

But then this person came too close, came into his space and it was happening so fast – they were reaching for his neck, and there was no time for thinking. Bucky reacted, stopped its hand and held it so tight that its bones ground together under his fingers.  He didn’t think, didn’t consider, only acted and fell into a long rote of self-preservation and violence.

The Winter Soldier was calmly scrolling down a list in his head, Ways to Disable Hands, Fingers, and Wrist Joints when it spoke to him. It didn’t fight. It didn’t squeal or try to barter or beg.

It spoke calmly to him instead. Like he was a person too, and not some machine.

And the Winter Soldier appreciated that. And the Winter Soldier let go.

Let go of Bucky too, until he was the one starring up at a woman who’d been hurt before. His mother had been the same way, and he recognized a person’s pain when they dealt with assault in such a practiced way. Stung to realize he was the one committing assault – a realization that Bucky thought had once gone against everything he stood for – he ducked his head in shame and didn’t watch her leave.

' _I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again.’_  What he thought was his father’s voice, every Sunday, came back to him. And Bucky felt even more like shit.

  

* * *

 

June was surprised when she saw the man sitting in the back booth again the next day – no tip usually meant an angry customer, and an angry customer didn’t usually come back. He appeared so suddenly it was like a hallucination at first – and she thought maybe her double night shift was getting to her.

All around was the chaos of the morning breakfast rush, orders shouted and silverware clanking, but Lonely Guy sat calmly and quietly in his booth, looking directly at her with those dangerous eyes. Seventy-four year old Lena usually handled the back section because she was ‘practically allergic to the sun and couldn’t afford to age much more,’ but she was out with the flu just like Justine and so it was left to June.

Upon closer inspection, he seemed even more worse for wear but no less a predator for it. Maybe she was just used to his aura or chakra or essence or whatever her Aunt Lisa would have called it.

“What’ll you have today?”

Someone had given him a menu, but he hardly glanced at it before looking up and asking, still flat and monotone, “What’s the special today?”

June glanced over her shoulder at the ancient menu board where pieces of wood with updated prices had been glued over the old – “Omelet with a choice of three ingredients and a cheese. Comes with toast or hash browns and a side of bacon or sausage.”

The specials rotated on a weekly schedule, it wasn’t like they were anything to write home about, so they were emblazoned across the top of the plastic menu in his hands. And while it was hardly 7:30 in the morning, June had already been faced with this question several times throughout the night. As she spoke, her hand reached out to point the special out to him.

Typical diner clatter stopped silent as the patrons watched Lonely Guy’s gloved left hand clenched around June’s wrist and the stack of plastic water glasses she was holding under one arm clattered to the floor. She stopped still, feeling the familiar fear response rising steadily throughout her body while his fingers shifted and tightened around the joint. She swallowed, tasting that sickly sweet indicator that meant her body was about to vomit in the back of her throat.

Just the strength of his grip told her that no amount of pulling would get her away from him – he’d have to let her go on his own. And showing him how afraid she was would only exacerbate the situation.

Lonely Guy was like a different person, June realized as she finally met his eyes. Though in their last meeting he’d always shuttered away any emotion, there was still the basic indicator that he was human and still good inside. Here there was none – nothing – an empty vessel wiped curiously blank – and June did not like the way that look made her feel, like a target.

“Please,”  June started softly, acutely aware of how the other patrons were watching but doing nothing. “Let go of my arm.”

Maybe it was the fact that she asked him, that she didn’t cry or plead, or fight him. But after a long moment, June repeated again, softly but firmly, “Let go of my arm.”

And he did.

There was something curiously hard and stiff about his palm as he let go, not the texture of flesh but of something less giving. June hardly paid attention to his hand, to hers – she was too busy watch clouds flicker over this man’s face – watching the brief flicks of sunlight interspersed among the moving darkness. Finally, finally after what seemed like years of tense silence held taught, the man’s eyes cleared and lightened before once again settling into the raw beauty she’d found so captivating the day before.

He didn’t say, “I’m sorry,” or “Please forgive me,” and June didn’t expect this twisted up person to do so; but he looked explicitly sorry and ashamed, and that was enough for her. Her body was beginning to quake and it always happened like this once the adrenaline faded. She had to forcibly swallow past the violent urge to vomit, keep her hands from shaking as she wrote a ‘#2’ on her pad.

“And what would you like in your omelet?” And rambled off the available choices.

Lonely Guy stared at her like she was crazy, like he was asking her, ‘What the hell are you still doing standing there?’ The only words spoken, monotone, “I don’t know.”

“Well,” And June swallowed again, acutely aware of every diner patron watching, the cook staring at her from behind his counter, the drone of car engines outside and the fluorescent lights flickering and it was too goddamn early in the morning and late in the night at the same time for – “What do you like?”

For a moment he watched the way her lips trembled, clenched tight, like he knew that she was trapping all those other thoughts inside. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” The pity, the sympathy for him and the helplessness he exhibited (in this sense) was still there, it was just falling deeper and deeper down into the pit of her stomach the longer this dragged out. She wrote down three popular choices – mushrooms, onions, and ham – and cheddar down on the pad without asking again. “Bacon or sausage?”

His eyelid was ticking again before he finally said, “I don’t know.”

“Sausage okay?” He nodded, and June jotted it down. “Hash browns?” Again, Lonely Guy nodded and she put it down robotically. “Your order will be ready shortly.”

The silence in the diner was slowly abating, as gradually chatter and the scraping of forks on plates and the sizzle of bacon on the back stove rose up again like some sort of oblivious sunrise to mock the storm she could feel her body going through. June slapped the order on the wheel, took her apron off, slapped $1.50 on the counter, and left with fifteen minutes to go on her shift.

She didn’t know why she put down coffee on her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! As always if you liked it, please tell me why. Same goes if you didn't like it. Thanks!


	3. in favor of the future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> June watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Steve argues with Tony, and Bucky gags on something everyone knows he ought to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies, my lovelies, for the longer wait in between chapters. I blame two things: the fact that despite all appearances, I have no actual idea where this is going, and my vacation to San Diego for Comic-Con.
> 
> That's right -- while Bucky and June pined and whined for me to put them down on paper, I was off swanning around the giant love affair to lines and comic books that is SDCC. In costume, no less.
> 
> Anyway, enjoy.

That was the night America’s Star Spangled Man with a Plan arrived back in New York City. Accompanying him on the ride down was the Falcon and the Black Widow – they split off early and headed for Stark Tower because apparently Tony was already grumpy enough about lending out so many floors of his god awful, self-glorifying monument to the rest of the crew – it was going to take a bit more convincing to pry another suite free for Sam. Tony had been pointedly mentioning some elevator breach for months now.

Steve didn’t really think it would be so easy to track down the Winter Soldier as returning to their mutual childhood, but it was worth a shot, wasn’t it?

Standing in front of the orphanage that he and Bucky had shared was far beyond a surreal experience. He thought that Darcy or Pepper might call it a post-modern moment, but Steve was sure that it was just nuts.

The building had been condemned years ago, so he could only peek through dusk and dirty windows into a building that had never really been good for much but was now good for nothing. No vandals except mice and rats had found their way in, so at least the lack of graffiti was good – kept the purposefully preserved rather than abandoned feeling that Steve found so totally disarming and comforting. Around the corner there he could even see a glimpse of their old room and the errant thought that maybe “BUCK” was still carved into one of the windowsills made him feel lighter.

For a moment a shadow flickered through, and Steve couldn’t decide whether it was just a glimpse of some forgotten memory or something decidedly less savory. He was halfway through convincing himself that it would be okay to break in and take a look around because he _was_ Captain America, after all, it really was just to make sure that everything was as it should be, when his phone rang.

And Stark Tech was loud. Ironically just like its creator.

“I won’t ever forgive you for setting Sam ‘I’m Better Than You’ Wilson on me.” Tony said by way of greeting when Steve forcibly smoothed the frown from his forehead and answered the phone. “I’m totally kicking you out now and giving your room to Hawkguy and his buttload of bow polishes.” An indignant squawk sounded in the background.

One of Iron Man’s hissy fits wasn’t exactly something anyone, especially Captain America, could ignore – so Steve turned his back on the old building and the shadow watching him in favor of the future.

 

* * *

 

After the incident, June went straight home. As she walked, she catalogued what zone she was in: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green – concurrent zones that spread out in circles around her little home – color coded for how safe she felt within them. She hadn’t had a Green zone in a long time, but now June’s apartment was Green, and smack dab in the middle of all the circles like some target or eye of the storm.

Up the stairs of her low-income, government subsidized housing, past her neighbors who were always arguing and her very nice landlord’s apartment and the crookedly hanging sign for Apt. 317, June opened her door and entered the Green.

The curtains were half open and everything was filmy with a hazy morning light that was so incessantly cheerful that it was disgusting. Nothing could be that cheerful when her hands were shaking so hard that she couldn’t do up the buttons on her pajamas. Half-undone and all skewed up, June curled up on her little couch, pulled an old blanket over her head, turned the television on to the Cartoon Network, and sat in a ball until she fell asleep.

The screeches of children and the barking of a dog woke June up, and she glanced at the clock on her television to find that it was hours later. Feeling blurry and sad when everything in her life was compared so sharply to childhood joy, she sat up to work a kink out of her back and rub her eyes with the backs of her hands. Maybe pressing hard enough would bring everything into focus.

Lonely Guy. The Predator. Stranger had left a mark on her. Her wrist protested when rotated, and a bruise had bloomed while she slept – but June still had a little Tiger Balm left over from her old life and it was no big deal.

She must have rolled over onto the remote while asleep because Buffy was playing on the television as June stood up, stretched, yawned while hair fell into her eyes and retrieved the balm. Her couch groaned when she sank heavily back down onto it and applied liberally, while Buffy in the guise of Anne worked a very familiar waitressing job in L.A. It occurred to her half way through watching the episode that Stranger might come back to the diner and what would she do then?

“What would you do Anne?” Of course, June didn’t expect an answer, but sometimes it helped to say things out loud like it might validate the need to get an opinion from a fictional character from the 90s.

Buffy, not Anne, was making decisions on the t.v. screen and somehow that felt pathetically inspirational to June. ‘I should at least be as determined as Buffy. As curious as Willow and as wise as Giles…’

The thought trailed off and June stood up to head into the bathroom, wondering if Stranger had driven her mad. “I’m fucking insane.” June said, again out loud, although this time to herself, as she turned on the shower and peeled off her clothes. “I’ve gone batshit insane.”

Not particularly because she was trying to inspire herself with vehemently purple prose (although that was part of it) but because the defining question of the moment was not, ‘What if he comes back?” but ‘Do I believe his unspoken apology? Was it heartfelt?’

This was the kind of question that required actual decision, June felt deeply, working knots out of her hair with her fingers. No room for grayscale because there had already been enough of that in her life. She need to pick one way or another – over the past few months it had slowly become clear to her that following one path or another no matter what it was would always be infinitely better than standing on the side of the road and allowing things to happen. Usually to her.

The slowness in which reality had overtaken him and yet shocked him with his own actions. That was the key there, she made a conscious effort to not think but decide, wincing as shampoo burned in her eyes. Stranger had thought himself better than that, had felt like shit after he’d done it – not false guilt like so many others, real shit – this one had a much fuller realization of everything he felt and did – if for no other reason than that he seemed to examine every emotion and action because it was foreign even to him.

And it was precisely that which set him apart from every other that she and so many other women had encountered. The water shut off and June toweled dry to the muffled sounds of Anne making a decision to become Buffy the Vampire Slayer again. She’d like to make another decision too, and damn it all if it wouldn’t feel so much better to believe.

 

* * *

 

Bucky slunk into the diner early the next morning and immediately felt as if he was recognized and reviled, whether that was true or not. In fact, he half expected there to be some warning about him plastered to the cork board of otherwise banal community announcements by the front door.

This time he forced himself to sit in a different booth, gritting his teeth when others settled behind him and warning bells went off in his head. He spent a few good moments cataloging the weapons upon his person and within arm’s reach, and then spent a few more forcibly relaxing the muscles in his body so that maybe, for once he might appear as less of a ticking time bomb to those around him.

June wasn’t within sight, but he knew that she’d come in for work that day because there was no standing backlog of plates to be delivered like there had been during his last visits and the other waitresses were running through their normal serving patterns without the rush that might come from being short handed. She appeared then at one end of the diner, brushing something off of her apron, head tilted down.

‘Safe.’ He thought even as those behind him stood up suddenly and instinct slid a still sheathed knife into his hidden palm. ‘I want to her to be safe around me.’

This was of course behind his decision to choose a booth closer to the middle of the diner where she might feel less isolated with him and she’d have closer access to all visible exit points. The motivation behind the low ponytail his hair was pulled back into so she could see his face better. The decision to acquire and wear gray clothes instead of black so as to appear less menacing.

The waitress’ eyes landed on him and then quickly skittered away, and Bucky felt unreasonably stung to see what he thought was reluctance on her face. It had been over seventy years since he’d last wanted to make a dame feel safe around him and maybe he’d lost some of his touch. Bringing the runt would probably make her feel better…

Fuzzy like the radio, Bucky’s head started pounding, so badly that he had to clench his eyes shut. Since his exodus from Hydra the pounding pain had started coming on more and more – telltale clues as to what his former organization had done their best to obliterate. In his pocket was a wrinkled napkin, from the diner coincidentally, on which he wrote down those clues to be pursued later.

They were the vaguest memories – the smell of someone’s perfume, foreign army insignia, the back alley of a movie theater, and the faces of men he swore were comrades in arms though he somehow knew that they were not Hydra. Ultimately they were nothing much but sentimental shreds of someone else, but he held onto them with the tightest of grips. Now Bucky took the napkin out and added the words, ‘the runt,’ to the list while someone approached his table. Another waitress, he knew because she walked much faster than June did, stopped in front of his table and asked what he wanted in a voice that betrayed her nerves.

He forced himself to look up and see what she thought of him written boldly across her face – fear and anger and revulsion that whipped him across the back with almost as much venom as June’s pained resignation had the day before. “I would like the other waitress.” Bucky didn’t have to say her name because he knew this waitress would know of whom he was speaking.

Had he been a lesser man, she might have denied him. But as it was, he stood his ground and stared her down until she called for June without looking away, smartly refusing to show any weakness to a shameful predator like him.

June came over much more slowly than she should, dragging out the uncomfortable gagging sensation that Bucky felt because there were words in his throat that he was no longer accustomed to saying. They’re finally face to face again and he watched the way her face tightened, as if he’s somehow familiar beyond this rocky little relationship that they have unintentionally begun. She was clearly expectant, and while somewhat unnerved, this June was determined, which both Bucky and the remaining Winter Soldier appreciated.

The other waitress was waiting too, and though he would have preferred that she leave, there was nothing to be done now because June was asking, “What’ll you have today?”

“I am sorry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh ho ho, looks like things might actually be moving along. Steve makes an appearance and even Tony gets into the spirit of things, albeit rather reluctantly.
> 
> Hopefully my attempt at an actual interaction/character growth for Bucky and June hasn't ruined everything else. I spent about ten minutes debating between Bucky saying 'I am sorry' and 'Forgiveness' - fingers crossed that I didn't make the wrong choice.
> 
> As usual, if you liked something, please tell me! If you didn't like something, tell me that too.


	4. the calm before the storm was almost at an end

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky shaves and Sam says, "Caw caw motherfucker."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright boys and girls, we're moving things along. In the right direction? Maybe? Do you think?
> 
> I'm trying to move everyone forward in a believable way, so you'll enjoy it? Maybe? Anyway, bad day guys. BAD DAY. Need some love if you've got any to give.

“How’s the eggs this morning, Buck?” She could never quite bring herself to call him _Bucky_ , of all the names a man like him might have, and he didn’t seem to mind.

Time had passed, and the two of them developed a sort of… rapport.

June didn’t want to be overly optimistic and call what they had a friendship, but seeing him come in at exactly 7:32 am every morning, 28 minutes before the end of her graveyard shift, was starting to put a smile on her face. Staring to persuade her that maybe she’d found someone who’d been to hell and back too, and knew intimately the desire to have a companion to lean on.

Each day that passed and June found herself thinking more and more about him –  in those kind of small ways that always surprised her when she realized their frequency – in those small ways that meant she was letting herself get dangerously attached, dangerously fast. This was her pattern – June was self-aware enough to realize that, and to see how she’d been led by the exact same actions into less than healthy relationships in the past. But maybe she just didn’t have the self-control needed to rip herself from the whirlpool early; maybe her mother’s disapproving voice was finally fading from her head; maybe she’d finally found someone who wouldn’t take advantage of that deficiency.

The more he came by, the more she believed she was right.

Buck wore the same thing every day, or as near copies that she couldn’t tell the difference. He pulled his hair back into a ponytail now instead of letting it tangle around his face. He ordered the same thing every morning and near about said the same exact thing every morning too. Sometimes it was obvious that he’d had a rough night by the rubbed raw darkness ringing his eyes, but that never changed his daily, “Good morning, doll.”

On him the nickname fit – so obviously an endearment rather than a patronization – that she didn’t dissuade him of it. If she was being honest with herself, his expression the first time it came out of his mouth was so startled and embarrassed that she couldn’t help but appreciate it. He hid the emotions quickly of course, storm eyes darting up to see if she’d caught any of it, and June pretended to studiously write his order down on her notepad.

The first time she sat down across from him at the end of her shift instead of heading straight for home, he blinked and didn’t say anything at all to her; far from being rude, he looked like the kind of person that this had never happened to before. The second day though, he motioned for the day waitress to bring her coffee and sternly stared down any attempts she might have made to pay for it.

One month into their balancing act things suddenly altered course.

He’d shaved.

June caught the other waitresses watching him with less than inconspicuous stares and read immediately how strange that made him feel because his face had been literally laid bare to her. Since she’d met him, thick stubble had grown into something of a beard, and now gone, she had to wonder where the hell this model of attraction had come from.

“That damn tongue of his.” June heard a newer waitress mutter to herself as she passed by and dropped a second coffee cup and a full pot onto the table. Kim’s hips were swaying a little more than usual, and prompted June’s  impromptu glance and subsequent discovery of her maybe friend’s apparently luscious mouth.

Kim was right. It was luscious.

The man in question took a second longer than he really should have to respond to his own name and her question, finally meeting her eyes only to look her over as if he was cataloging all the changes he found. He didn’t mention if he’d noticed either the comment or the appraisal, and for that June was oddly, embarrassedly grateful. “Good morning, doll.”

Buck’s voice was still monotone, but there was more to his eyes than there had ever been before, and June got the feeling sometimes that he was a person only just now getting to know himself again. Kind of an amnesiac, and while that most times struck her with a welling empathy in her chest, it also meant that she’d developed a probably unhealthy attachment to the moments when he discovered one more piece of himself.

It felt like she was the first person to see an ancient treasure in a thousand years, and June guarded that privilege jealously.

He’d mentioned some runt kid once, and that was one gem. Calling her ‘doll’ was another. But this might have been the biggest of all.

“You look very nice this morning, Buck.” She conceded with a smile that was small enough, but still as large as she could manage after 12 hours on her feet.

“Probably shouldn’t go around scaring blue hairs and kiddies if I can help it.” He sipped coffee around the driest wit she’d ever encountered, always taken black, and turned to watch someone out the window with that sniper gaze she’d come to recognize. It was like he was looking ten steps ahead of everyone else, with a gaze like that. He still hadn’t mentioned any military service, and she would never push, but she could guess.

As it was, the change in profile afforded June a much closer look at features that surprised her with their classical appeal. Somehow it had never occurred to her that under all the scruff might be a man someone could not only depend upon but also want. Buck turned that far reaching gaze back on her as she shifted uncomfortably in the booth, stuck with the realization that this was the first man she had _wanted_ since she’d come to her senses on the side of the freeway two years earlier.

Over the rim of her coffee cup, trying to hide a smile because such small things could throw him for a loop, she answered, “You’re right, that would be an admirable goal.”

“You don’t think the hair is enough?” Buck tilted his head back and looked down his nose at her, but maybe, maybe there was the smallest curve to that one side of his lips.

June shrugged, feeling her heart begin to pound a little harder with the thrill of speaking her mind and potentially matching wits. Or whatever she had left of them. “I think you could walk onto a bad movie set and they’d stick you on screen, but yes, the hair is a start.”

“You think I could be in the pictures, doll?” Totally straight faced except for one raised eyebrow and that only made it all the more secretly smug.

“As the hunchback, maybe.”

 _‘Something’s different about you. Already.’_  Lena’s offhand comment in the middle of the graveyard shift came to her. _‘Maybe it’s a man, maybe it’s just good hard sex, but I like it.’_

It wasn’t uncommon for Lena to disturb someone with her general lack of verbal filter – she swore her granddaughter Darcy had the same exact problem and the poor girl was bound to insult some head of state and wind up in a detention cell someday – so June knew the older woman didn’t exactly mean it _like that_. After all, Lena was the Great Procurer of This Job, and the Great Bed Provider and House Warmer and Old Friend and Generally Wonderful Person.

And it was nice to think that they were getting better together, she and Buck – though at this point she’d die before she told him that sometimes she thought of them as a unified front against the world – June and Buck United in Arms or something. And he was better too: almost maybe smiling, engaging in what might resemble banter, buying her coffee.

But June, this was only the beginning. She’d re-discovered herself before too, and the easiest of wounds to heal came first. And just as you started to believe that maybe you had a handle on things, that everything was going to work out, that you were making extraordinary progress, it all went to shit.

June was dragged from her thoughts with a clatter at the front door as the owner came in, banging about with his old cane as usual. Mr. Hodge was nice enough, old as the hills, and one to stick by his gut feelings. Tall but stooped over, still with some snow white hair left on his head, and sharp brown eyes, he had a nasty habit of tapping the limbs of anyone or thing in his way. He hadn’t been into the diner in some time, and they’d all begun to worry, so it was nice for once to hear the ‘thwacks’ of his cane against the legs of careless patrons.

 Those he tapped might not like him so much, but he’d hired her upon Lena’s good recommendation, and that was enough to put him in June’s good graces for a lifetime.

“It’s about time for me to go home, Buck. What about-“

But upon turning around, Buck was gone.

 

* * *

 

Buck, Bucky, sometimes he couldn’t decide which, hadn’t called a woman ‘doll’ in over seventy years.

At least, he strongly suspected so. It was another one of those ragged thoughts from Before that he was slowly trying to piece together, and this one seemed much more tightly woven than the others. And he liked saying it, so there was that.

He found himself liking June’s soft blush when he said it, too. On bad mornings, he’d find himself saying it and in response, the Winter Soldier would calculate how much more or less vulnerable that might make her to an attack, calculated that it would slow down her reaction time to any sort of strike from across the table; not that a higher reaction time would help her either way. Sometimes, once or twice, he caught that thought prompting him to say it again and again, just to see how vulnerable he could make her.

Buck did _not_ like those inclinations. They usually meant he was going head first into another bad night filled with bright lights in his dreams and the horrible sensation of plastic clenched between his teeth. His gums always ached after those dreams; his head always ached after those dreams until he had to forcibly restrain it and pull himself back from the edge, usually by, ironically, by thinking of the blush.

He did not want to mistake those thoughts for romance – the Winter Soldier was unfeeling after all, incapable of those kinds of things and Buck was thinking that maybe he was too. But the dash of red reminded him of softer moments, and since he was actively trying to remember those…

Well, he didn’t think he could sort through a tangle like that at a time like this, but he did know that he enjoyed their morning breakfasts together. It was a ritual, it was safe, and he was starting to depend on them – almost like his command meetings in between freezes.

Today, June was feeling good, feeling sharp. He could tell as she approached by the quickness of her steps, the way she put effort into weaving around crowds in the aisles instead of waiting deferentially for them to clear. She wore a new shirt, v-neck he noted with long absent male attention, one that finally fit her. Her hair had taken on more of a red-brown, dark copper shine to it, and a week ago she’d begun to put on light make-up in the mornings. This was her first morning in lipstick.

Buck liked it, it looked good on her. There was a quirk to her cheeks, dimples, that hadn’t been there before. And amid all the other waitresses’ the frankly blatant interest in his new appearance this morning, she snuck in the shyest and smallest of glances.

June chatted more, grinned one more time than average behind her coffee cup, leaned farther across the table than she usually did when she filled up his coffee, so she must have appreciated his attempt at civility too. The shave still left him feeling too exposed – having long since become accustomed to a mask over his features, the beard growth had been a security blanket he needed to shed. The cuts under his chin and on his neck from the dull razor and dim light still stung, but it had to be done, even as every stroke had tugged more and more on his unease.

When a soldier’s instinct screamed that something was about to happen, that the calm before the storm was almost at an end, it was usually a good idea to get out of Dodge, as they said. But Buck had ignored that unsettling stone of apprehension in his chest in favor of companionship and breakfast, had shown up as usual without much regard for the feeling that had saved his life many times before. Except that it was right, it was always right.

Because of course just at that moment, his old army buddy, Gilmore Hodge, walked into the diner that morning.

 

* * *

 

“No sightings from the sky. Heading back to the bird nest.”

“Goddamn, you never miss a chance, do you?” Tony Stark buzzed, irritated and grumpy, into Sam Wilson’s headpiece through his suit’s communication system. He and the “Falcon” had been assigned by a grimly sleep-deprived Captain America to sweep another section of the outlying lands, this time around Albany, for any sign of the Winter Soldier.

Sam grinned and wished Stark could see the satisfaction with which he replied, “Caw caw, motherfucker. I’m the Falcon, so yeah.” He’d taken to flying in overlapping circles every few hundred yards instead of the grid pattern that Iron Man favored, and below him the land looked like it was distinctly lacking terror, assassin-caused or otherwise.

“Okay, well, that one was pretty good. I’ll give you that one.”

“Of course it was.” Sam paused, trying cover up how exhausted they all were, how he’d somehow thought that with the freakin’ Avengers on their side, they’d track down the Winter Soldier in a week, tops. “You got anything?”

“Nada.” Tony was flying at the slowest speed he could bear, looking in vain over the treetops for some sort of anomaly that might catch his eye. So far, all he’d been able to do was calculate the average number of pigeons in a flock because they seemed perversely attracted to the shininess of his armor. “Not a damn thing. This bastard is going to have to seriously screw up for us to find him.”

While Sam might secretly have been inclined to agree with Iron Man’s assessment, Cap’s equally tired but also quite disapproving voice through their earpieces reminded them how much, exactly, this mission meant to his good friend. “Bucky is a good soldier. He’s a good man. He won’t mess up, either. But we’ll find him.”

Tony snorted indiscreetly, the two pilots sighting each other from a couple hundred feet off as they circled back to return to the tower. “Capsicle, you are way too confident in our ability to actually do shit.”

“We’ll get him.” Steve repeated, more to convince himself than the others. “I know him. He wants to be found.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I literally could not resist Sam Wilson's 'caw caw' line, because WHO COULD? Also I hope you'll forgive my indulgent mention of Bucky/Sebastian's lips, because the net is rotten with gifs of a Mr. Stan, in I'm sure a very absentminded habit, blatantly not keeping his tongue in his mouth. His very amazing tongue. Check it out if you don't know what I'm talking about. Because reasons.
> 
> Anyway, if you don't like something, maybe tell me next time? And if you do like something, could you maybe tell me this time? Today was ridiculously, horribly bad and I was given too weeks notice at work. Sooooo… I am not above using my shame on the web for cookies.


	5. do i know you? no.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shit begins to hit the fan and Bucky tries to protect his whereabouts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, imma back with another chapter! Thanks to everyone for your kind words last chapter, especially in regards to the job. It's a tough situation right now, and it's hard to convince myself that maybe this can be a positive thing for me, especially considering how I was treated there, but I'm doing my best, promise.
> 
> Apologies for any typos, not only am I pretty much falling asleep at the wheel right now, but I'm typing one-handed after foolishly reawakening an old wrist injury with last weekend's seven hours of wire jewelry making. Oops.

For the next three days, Buck walked into the diner with his jaw aching, his head pounding, and though he did his best to reign in the strength, the force of habit and training in his skull that was the Winter Soldier, he wasn’t always successful. More times than he would ever care to admit, he found himself calculating how he could acquire a steak knife and swiftly end the life of the woman sitting across the coffee table from him. Buck struggled against those ideas – they left a bitter and angry taste in his mouth that not even the strongest coffee could wash away – but the Soldier was still strong inside, still powerful.

‘She’s the only one who would notice me. Who might be able to tell HYDRA and SHIELD anything about me.’ He’d think over and over late at night and early in the morning. The appearance of Gilmore Hodge had left Buck startled, even, and he was loathe to admit it, frightened. SHIELD was no easy government entity with a soft underbelly, even scattered as they were.

And Hodge was now the biggest threat; something in his head told him: Hodge knew who he had been, knew who would be looking for him, knew how to get him caught. Conducting unwilling reconnaissance in the last few nights had told Buck exactly who the man was:  former companion and fellow soldier to Captain America and Bucky Barnes.

Though the now elderly diner owner had only glimpsed Buck for a moment, it was too early to tell if he understood what he’d seen. Conflicted, overloaded, scattered as to what he should do, at least the silver lining was that his teeth had stopped their perpetual throbbing after three nights of clenching them in through dark, torn dreams of noise and war.

It was the fourth morning, and June was starting at him, obviously concerned. Now though, it had been so long since someone was concerned for him as a person rather than him as a machine that it just felt awkward instead of comforting. She pushed the traditional morning beverage across the chipped diner table to him, and there were suds from the bottom of the jostled carafe floating on the top when he got it, and so Bucky pretended to be engrossed in them instead of looking up into what he supposed was his first new friend in seventy years. Something professional and cold and distinctly manufactured inside of him rebels against the idea of a ‘friend,’ but Bucky swallowed around that lump in his throat and tried to think of the time when he had another friend.

“Are you okay, Buck?” June asked, feeling worried enough to eschew their normal friendly formalities. She had been waiting impatiently for him to acknowledge her for some time now, except she was done waiting and wanted eye contact. She’d seen him enough times that she thought that she knew when things had truly been difficult for him, and she was right – she could pinpoint the conscious effort he put into remembering when and where he was.

“Morning, doll.” He said distractedly, looking briefly down at the egg yolks that were bleeding out onto the rest of the plate.

“Are you sure?” June was watching him with these big eyes that looked like colored glass in the morning light reflecting off of the scratched pane glass window at their booth. She was wearing lipstick again but it was smudged a little from a long night of drinking coffee by the pot and working hard; one lip was caught in between little sharp teeth that ate off the lipstick even more.

“Yes!” He snapped too sharply, feeling bad about it as soon as the word spewed from his mouth – she’d done nothing wrong after all – but he did nothing to apologize for it.

The best thing though, was that instead of driving her away, it only made her more concerned. And while that cut Buck to the quick with guilt, it reminded him nicely, warmly, that the person facing him was, entirely, a friend. No opposition to be found here.

He saw how she hesitated, how June reached for him but still unsure, let her hand hover in the air between them. Since their unfortunate introduction to each other, they’d not touched, not crossed that unspoken boundary strung out between them like a row of tire shredders. Touch freely given and taken was not an intimacy yet shared, but here she was about to offer it up without prompting, without guarantee that the her clearly distressed ally would not react as he had before. He knew enough of her past from confessions dropped here and there to know that this was probably exactly the same behavior to have drawn her into such deep trouble before, but he couldn’t be bothered to be anything but grateful for it then.

Buck flinched when she finally took his hand – his real hand – into hers. She slipped her thumb under and up into the cradle of his downturned palm, the rest of her fingers grasping his hand firmly, settling him into the feeling quickly. June felt warm, felt strong in the core of her grip, had hands that made him think he might have taken too much for granted her mouse act. Strangely that made him glad, that if someone like him came for her she might be able to do something, anything, to protect herself.

“Buck,” She was leaning across the table, intent, face serious and troubled, except that buck was no longer paying attention. Instead he watched as Hodge tottered slowly into the diner.

Their eyes met squarely, as if Hodge had been unconsciously seeking out the disturbance from earlier. For a moment sound stopped and the world halted; the only two people in the world were thrown violently back into a vivid, Technicolor world of gunfire and dancing girls and mud and a man dressed in the red, white, and blue.

“I want you to know that if anything is going on that you need help with, I’ve been there. I’m here to help you.” June was saying, as Buck felt cold sweat break out all over his body and the diner returned to focus.

Hodge looked stunned, baffled, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and the Buck couldn’t blame him. The older man stood in the doorway of his own restaurant, frozen and unspeaking until a careless patron rushed past him, unthinking. He flailed, unbalanced physically and mentally, and an uproar in the diner surged when he fell to the floor in a clatter. Waitresses rushed to his side, June included, leaving Buck quietly sitting what had become his booth, trying to process what should come next.

June would understand, he rationalized as he left money to cover their food on the table and stood up to leave. She’d just understand that he _had_ to leave the noise and commotion behind, _had_ to slip quietly out the kitchens when all were distracted and into a city that wouldn’t know him. Too much entanglement was beginning to gnaw at him – there were too many burdens he wanted to shed. June was the only one he wanted to hold onto.

* * *

 

“Cap thinks he’s got a lead somewhere but Tony’s being… Tony. So I got up into the vents and Jarvis let me into his lab to-”

Natasha listened to the Stark phone she’d liberated from Tony’s stash some time ago. For once, amid all the commotion of SHIELD’s collapse and Steve’s furious, unrelenting search for his childhood friend, it was a casual day for the Black Widow.

Instead of a skintight black cat suit meant for infiltration and night missions that was strong enough to withstand substantial combat damage, she wore jeans and a hoodie, had her bright red hair pulled into a low ponytail. Instead of being on some top secret mission that meant life or death for a group of terrorized hostage/scientists held in some underground lab, she was on a quest: for breakfast.

Dr. Foster’s assistant, Darcy, had been going on and on for weeks about the best breakfast shop in Brooklyn and finally Nat couldn’t stand listening to all that talk and not going. She’d been cautioned to go early though, or the wait could be horrendous, which was why she was up with the sun on a rest day. Briefly she’d considered inviting one of the others, Sam or Clint maybe, but lately she’d been craving some time away and the anonymity that came with it.

Anonymity unfortunately or fortunately depending upon how she felt, did not necessarily mean non-contact though. Clint being Clint had called to update her on the goings on in Avengers Tower, because around the Hulk and Thor a lot could happen even in six or seven hours. “And Tony walked in and he was like, ‘What the hell dude?’ And I said, ‘Okay, this looks bad.’”*

“So of course, it is bad.” She interrupted, enjoying the feel of crisply cold air in the morning. A distinctly pessimistic part of her demanded to know when, exactly, a new wave of shit would hit the fan, but Nat, feeling strangely at ease, shoved it down into a tight, rarely used box in the back of her brain.

“It wasn’t that bad this time.” Clint defended himself adamantly, and Nat could picture him on top of the roof where he customarily took his morning coffee, with a disgruntled little frown on his face. “At least this time Pepper says it can be fixed a few days, unlike the stuff Hulk smashed three months ago.”

“Listen I’ll call you back.” Natasha opened that roughly used mental box with a sigh, slipping back into her usual awareness. The shop she sought was in sight, except there was a crowd of people in the doorway, half spilling out into a disorganized mess onto the sidewalk. Off to the side, one man was carrying over a lawn chair from his open car trunk, a woman was holding up a half empty bottle of water, and on the floor was an elderly gentleman, clearly shaken.

He seemed fine, if bruised, when she jogged over, calmly inserting herself into the eye of the storm while at least three waitresses surrounded him and helped him into the now upright lawn chair. The man’s face was bloodless and white, strangely smooth with shock despite his age, and his hands were shaking as he gripped anything he could find for stability.

“Are you alright? What happened?” Natasha relaxed a little out of the Black Widow, finding the incident mundane enough as it was.

“I thought I saw a, a ghost.” The old man was vaguely familiar in the way most older white men did, except this one had a WW2 veteran’s patch on his jacket and she thought upon closer inspection that maybe she’d seen a much younger version of him in some black and white snapshot.

From the doorway of the diner, an average looking waitress twisted red brown hair into knots as she looked for someone, someone lost. “Has anyone seen Buck?”

 

* * *

 

 Hours Later

“Thank you Steve. I just… thought you should know.” A pause. “Yes, you too. Goodbye.”  Hours later and his back ached, his hip throbbed, and his neck screamed in pain. A lifetime of combat injuries had laid waste to his body long ago, and old age and clumsiness had only exacerbated the problem. Instead of going to bed, the lone occupant of the room only took more painkillers.

Ninety-three year old Gilmore Hodge sat in his darkened kitchen that night, staring at his telephone set and an old photo. The phone was normal enough, called normal people except for this once Captain America, Steve Rogers. The photo was of interest though, was grainy and wrinkled but had come to be cherished in his last years of old age; looking down on it, he found himself staring at the faces of his old comrades, at the 107th.

Those were the days, really, he decided – not like the dredges of old age that left him sitting alone in a big house. The years had been kind to Hodge: a wife, children, a business, a house with tiled floors and surrounding property enough that he felt like he could breathe, but they couldn’t compare to the time he’d spent with the men in that picture.

In particular, he’d had his grandchildren drag this photo out to look at the face of one man: Sergeant Barnes of the 107th. That face in particular was grainy and hard to distinguish but it still confirmed his suspicions.

Leaning back, his chair scraped the black and white tile floor, and his kitchen sink was quietly dripping off to the side. His window was open to a slant of moonlight that just touched the tops of the old wingtips he insisted on wearing. Off in the distance he heard the call of an owl in the darkness, and wondered if waiting till night when no one could see or hear him call Steve was too cowardly to bear. Especially knowing that Steve was young and strong on the other end, while he was old, weak, and slouched in his un-tucked button up shirt and loose suspenders.

Hodge sighed loudly into an empty night that was quiet, but not quite quiet enough to reveal the approach of a dark figure that crept along the corners of the old house until reaching the nighttime informant.

Breaking the solitude was the shadow rapidly gaining male form. “Gilmore Hodge?”

The old man caught of glimpse of shining metal in the moonlight, a slice of a face. “Don’t – Do I know you?”

“No.”

 _Blam._ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okies... how was that? This chapter was pretty much about Bucky only and I'm planning for the next one to be about June, which I know is not the norm, but oh well.
> 
> * Direct quote from pretty much every other line of the Hawkeye Fraction-Verse, which is AMAZIIIIIINNNNGGGGGGG. So if you haven't read it, I am officially ordering you to do so.
> 
> ** Brubaker, Ed. "Three." In Captain America Winter Soldier Ultimate Collection. New York: Marvel, 2010. Direct reference to the scene in which Bucky kills Jack Monroe. Equally amazing compilation. Like seriously. You. Must. Read. This. All. The. Feels.
> 
> As usual, if you liked something, please tell me! If you didn't like something, tell me that too. And now, time for sleep.


	6. hello yes, i'm looking for buck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kitty Pryde runs a restaurant, Peter Parker takes pictures, Maria Hill gets sick of health food, and the daughter of the Nevada Governor gets kidnapped. She's also hot for Bucky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *laughs awkwardly and hopes that you all won't notice how long it's been* I really am so sorry guys, but on the bright side, this turned out much longer than I thought it would. Chapter Six ahoy!
> 
> Also, NaNoWriMo is almost upon us. So 1) I really need to get back into a writing jive before Nov. 1 and 2) hit me up. Let's be writing buddies, I'm known as Late March there too. http://nanowrimo.org/participants/late-march

“I don’t know how long I’ll stay open.” Said the dark haired stranger who had already confessed to not knowing anything about the restaurant business. “But at least for now, nothing’s going to change.”

Mr. Hodge’s niece spoke solemnly to the diner staff after the funeral, all bundled up and looking far too small in her large winter coat – obviously someone else’s jacket that she had borrowed – and while the news was bittersweet and frightening, at least she was honest about it. Ms. Pryde didn’t even need to keep the restaurant open as a source of income because she had another job in Westchester, security work or teaching, it wasn’t quite clear.

Obviously attempting to soften the blow, Hodge’s niece had arranged for a nice reception spread, and there was even a newspaper journalist from the Bugle in attendance. The late diner proprietor had been one of the last surviving WWII vets in the country, a bona fide hero with the Purple Heart and everything. The reporter was attentive enough to corner them all for quotes, but mostly he seemed disappointed that Captain America hadn’t shown up for the service.

In fact, most of the chatter in the crowd seemed to ask the same question. Hadn’t they served together in WWII? Weren’t they army buddies? And didn’t Captain America seem like the sort of man who’d attend a thing like this? Offhandedly and only when asked, June commented about how she would have come to the service if she was the Captain, but it was still foolish and dishonest of her to speak as if she might be in any way better than a national icon.

“At least we’ll get our picture in the paper.” Lena had finally disentangled herself from distant relations to stand a comforting presence next to June. They were being arranged for a group shot to accompany the article by the reporter. “If Captain Rogers were here, all the pictures would be of him.”

“Say cheese.” June agreed under her breath, mouth pushed into the smallest acceptable smile.

“Peter! Start paying attention and take some pictures!” By the end of the day, everyone pitied at least one person more than themselves, and that was the Bugle photographer. Poor kid.

* * *

 

 “Разве ты не видишь, что я читаю? Перейти ебут вокруг в другом месте.” Natasha didn’t bother to take her eyes off of her newspaper as Clint elbowed her for the fourth time that morning. The first three infractions had been incidental, as he was restringing several of the older bows in his collection that required special attention. The last one was on purpose though, and her hand shot out to grab the bowstring he was currently plucking like a harp chord.

Clint grinned into his work when he thought it wouldn’t be immediately obvious. “Well at least read out loud, some of us are working and don’t have time to read, you know.”

They were sitting on the circular black leather couch in the fourth highest of the residential levels in Avengers Tower; sunlight reflected off the windows of nearby office buildings, the tower was quiet, New York City lay itself out in front of them like a prize won in a fight, and the coffee was good that morning: Nat was feeling generous enough to read aloud, but that didn’t mean she’d let Clint have his way so easily. “Have JARVIS read to you if you need a naptime story.”

The team’s bowman was better than that though – he knew her too well, and he also knew how good the coffee was because someone besides Jane had made it that morning – Clint elbowed her again. “Come on, Nat. I live for your dulcet tones.”

Black Widow muttered some particularly low insults in Russian about how he lived for something entirely inappropriate as Pietro appeared in front of them, throwing himself on the far end of the couch, his hair disturbingly white in the sunny glare from outside. “Story time?”

“One article.” Clint compromised as Pietro disappeared and re-appeared again with a plate of breakfast: Eggs Benedict.

Blinking slowly in a way that promised some form of retribution, Natasha began, “WWII Veteran Murdered, No Suspect in Custody.”

“Is that-?” Pietro asked through a mouthful of egg, some sauce on his chin.

“Yes.”

“Did he go?”

“Nope.” This time Clint answered, rather grimly as if he disapproved. “Still looking for Bucky.”

“Bummer.”

Natasha inserted herself back into the conversation, flipping to Page 2 so she could finish the article. “Officials said Tuesday that they are devoting all possible resources to solving the murder of army veteran Gilmore Hodge. 93 year old Hodge was found dead in his home Saturday morning by his in-home nurse after suffering a fall the day before. No suspects have so far been brought into custody.”

* * *

 

 June did not see Buck for six days after the death of Mr. Hodge.

The restaurant was closed out of respect for the weekend, but then it was back to peppers, onions, and celery, the holy trinity of diners, because even if folks hadn’t been able to attend the funeral, they could still eat a Gil’s and murmur their condolences between orders. Each morning she looked for the strange man that had become a friend, a confidant – become more than she’d ever anticipated – and each morning June found _herself_ disappointed, but never him.

Lena proved to be a warm shoulder to lean upon but even she couldn’t fix everything – worry kept June up all hours of the day and night that she might arrive for her next shift only to be told that the diner was closing. How would she be able to pay her rent? Buy food? Pay for utilities? Save for a rainy day?

Everyone else on the diner staff spent their time together repeating, over and over again, “When one door closes, another one opens.” Or some variation of that, to comfort themselves just in case the news did come down that Gil’s was closing it’s doors forever. Things would be alright – they’d all get new jobs, right?

 June was too pessimistic, or maybe realistic, to believe it. Sometimes a door didn’t open for you right way. Sometimes it took months and years and in the meantime you had to scrape and scratch for survival, sinking to depths that would otherwise make your stomach curdle and your chest hurt with shame. Sometimes it wasn’t even a door, but rather a window you had to claw at and pry open for the desperate chance to raise yourself up.

Having just pulled herself out of such a pit, it was particularly disheartening for June to sit huddled around a bargain brand tv dinner each night, wondering how long it was going to be until she fell back down again. Somehow, it occurred to her several nights in, it would all seem so much better if she still had Buck by her side; she remembered all the times she’d bashfully thought of them as a team, Buck and June Against the World…

Just the thought of that now made her dump her dinner down the drain half-eaten. Staring down at the lumpy mashed potatoes and soggy vegetables sitting at the bottom of her sink, June recognized the signs – depression was a dangerous fire to play with after all – and didn’t really care.

One thing June did not realize was that all those mornings ago, a dangerously broken person whom at once had no past and too much of one walked into her life in an unprecedented turn of what some might have called fate. And just like that, her life had been changed, whether for better or for worse she wouldn’t be able to say for some time. The path that may have lain before her took a sudden turn to the left, off the beaten pathway.

On the seventh night after the death of Gilmore Hodge, it veered over a cliff.

* * *

 

 “I hate sweating all the damn time.” June told her empty apartment as she swung her legs off her bed and stood up; no one answered back, which was well enough even though she found herself wishing that Buck would magically appear. Her sheets were too sticky with sweat to be truly comfortable until both she and they dried out a little bit.

The one window in her bedroom opened with a squeal that made her wince, but the slightly cooler air outside was worth it. Old, rough wood on the window frame bit into her forearms as she leaned out the window, but June needed to feel the wind on her face, at least for a few moments that night. Lit by sepia streetlights, everything seemed sedate and sweltering in the heat, even at – she glanced at her clock – 2:00 a.m, but at least it was quiet out.

After another day of riotous emotion and ever-gnawing worry, June was desperately craving stillness, peace in a world that was slowly emptying of opportunity. Even sleep couldn’t bring her any rest, instead tossing and turning unhappily under the covers because she couldn’t find the off switch to her thoughts.

It was nights like this that were the worst – they brought out those old thoughts of bygone hot summer nights that for a normal person would appear as reminiscence but for June appeared as regret. Sometimes she thought of being a kid and running around under the streetlamps with neighborhood friends under her older sister’s watchful eye, coming in sweaty and dirty and being pressed into a bath by her mother. But that was a long time ago, and that June was dead and buried.

Her floors creaked as she dragged herself into the kitchen in the dark, not bothering to turn any of the lights on as she blindly grabbed for a glass from the cupboard and pressed it into the little water dispenser on her fridge. Misjudging the distance, icy water spilled onto her hand and instead of cleaning it up, June lingered for a moment longer than she should have before filling up the glass.

Across the street a light ticked on in a stranger’s apartment as she drank, someone probably heading for the bathroom or thirsty like her, she decided. Except as she watched, another form joined the first and the sheer curtains ruffled in a breeze through their open window. The two silhouettes meshed till they were one, joined by their mouths and pressed together from breast to thigh.

June, unexpected voyeur, took another sip of water and knew full well that she should look away instead of keep watching. She felt her cheeks heating as dark, inappropriate ideas began to filter through; turning after several more heated moments to press her back to the counter edge, she thought of only one person.

They’d never really touched, so the sudden concept of having Buck’s hands on her body seemed so totally illicit and exciting. She wondered what kinds of calluses he might have on his hands, and how entirely interesting they might feel gliding over her back or breasts, if his hair was long enough to tickle his face when he held himself over her, if he had freckles on his shoulders from the sun, if his tongue felt as insolent as it looked.

A brief moment of hesitation stalled the fantasy before it could run entirely out of control but then, June rationalized, Buck was gone. These kind of thoughts only got her into trouble when the man in question hung around, and Buck had disappeared off the face of the earth. This could be her safe, beautiful secret – something to think of even after 40 years in a minimum wage job or constant supervision and matchmaking should she ever decide to go home.

Impulsively she wanted to taste the word, knew the empty kitchen wouldn’t give up her secret. “Buck.”

Except there was a rustle, a shifting of feet on the old linoleum floor like someone was standing in the corner even though June knew she was alone. In the moments afterward, it was almost too quiet, quiet enough to set the hair on her arms prickling in warning. Holding her breath as if that might make a difference, her fingers searched out the nearest light switch and flicked it on.

Like always the light blinded her, and at first glance she was alone. But then as the glare faded from her eyes and a masked figure in black stood in the corner of her kitchen and didn’t flinch when the half-full water glass June threw at him sailed into the wall just an inch to the right of his head.

The crack of reality shocked a scream out of her as she scrambled into her living room and ran for the bedroom doors – answering, a dog began barking in the neighborhood and footsteps too soft for a man that size pursued her with frightening speed. Playing out like a movie in her head, everything happened in bursts of action and terrifying moments of silent, scrambling ineptitude.

Her fingers slipped around the bedroom doorknob and a hand clamped down on her elbow just as the door opened. Screaming again, June abandoned flight in favor of fight and swung around with a cocked fist that was caught and twisted behind her back. She fought for a moment, throwing her weight against the attacker as violently as she could and struggling to breathe before dropping limply into dead weight in his arms.

The masked man didn’t stagger with her sudden weight as she hoped, only competently hoisted her higher into his arms and began to make his way to her front door. Passing the side table next to the couch, June reached out and barely snagged a cheap metal lamp from it’s stand before she surprised him by swinging it up and braining him with it.

This time he did drop her, and she scrabbled on all fours across her living room before standing up and brandishing the lamp like a baseball bat in front of her. They were both breathing heavily, although she thought he was panting more from irritation than exertion, and faced each other down in the half-lit room like old enemies. “I’m going to scream if you don’t leave.” She warned him, and reached behind herself to search for, grab, and throw a scented candle at his head. “I’m going to scream!”

The attacker stared at her for the longest time while the rest of the world slept outside, and then shrugged, no concern of his. _‘He was playing with me the whole time.’_ June realized as he moved so fast that she could hardly follow his movements. Frighteningly calm, the stranger wrenched the lamp out of her hands and hit her over the head with it.

* * *

 

 “Hold on. I’m getting a text.” Steve pulled his phone out of his pocket as he sat between Sam and Maria Hill at a beer pub bar. Maria checked in on them and their search occasionally, and had been persuaded to stay for dinner because she was sick of the health food vending machines Pepper insisted on at all Stark worksites.

“Looks like someone really wants your attention.” Sam commented from over the rim of his beer stein as the phone in question vibrated violently several more times in Steve’s hand. Both he and Maria tipped their bar stools forward curiously.

“Goddamn modern garbage.” Steve muttered, irritated, as he struggled to maneuver the tiny buttons on the phone. Another long day, let alone another long week of empty searching and Steve was beginning to feel like he was at the end of his rope. Even the other Avengers were beginning to avoid him lately, especially after the phone call from Hodge and his death that night… Left shaken and suspicious, throwing himself headfirst into looking for Bucky had been all he could bring himself to manage.

Maria plucked the phone out of his hands before he accidentally broke _another one_ with serum-tempered strength, and flicked the phone on to wash her face in blue-white light from the screen. “Just let me do it! Looks like they’re all from Natasha.”

She ignored the expectant faces of her soldier companions as she read, “Need you back at the tower. Saw this woman at the diner.”

“And that’s all she said? What diner?”

“Hold on, hold on.” She glanced briefly up at Steve in chastisement for his uncharacteristic lack of patience. “They’re still loading.”

From down the bar, Sam was already signaling for their check and pulling his wallet out when he thought Steve wasn’t looking. “Shouldn’t Stark Tech go faster than that?”

Sardonically, “You’d think so, wouldn’t you.” Maria replied before quickly swiping through incoming messages to hold up a just loaded picture. It wasn’t great quality, obviously a far away shot zoomed in far beyond its recommended resolution, and depicted a thin red-headed woman in a black dress. She wasn’t smiling, obviously trying to look respectful for the photographer but not really understanding how to do so, and the somber set of her face suggested she was at a funeral.

“I’ve never seen her before in my life.” Steve leaned in till the phone was just inches from his face.

“Yeah, but Natasha has. And you’d be interested to know where.” Maria glanced around belatedly to see if anyone might be listening as she swiped through the next messages. Her time away from SHIELD was softening her, she decided, rather disappointed in herself.

There was an opened link to an online newspaper, headline reading, ‘Brooklyn Waitress, Nevada Governor’s Daughter, Kidnapped.’ And the texts below read:

Recognize her a few weeks ago at Hodge’s diner. Worked there. Mentioned something about looking for a buck. Meant, LOOKING FOR BUCK. – N

“I’m thinking this is what they call a smoking gun.” Sam was saying to Maria, but Steve was already out the door.

* * *

 

 Really it was the lack of noise that woke June up, the incredibly off-putting stillness that alerted her to the wrongness of it all as she gradually became conscious. Her head pounded, signal enough that she wasn’t dead, and some exploratory movements found something tied around her wrists.

Off to the side there was a muted shuffling, and she stilled suddenly, hoping to be taken for still sleeping. The shuffling came closer, and a garbled, muffled voice told her something in what sounded like a confused mixture of English and Russian. A boot toe nudged her in side, and June opened her eyes to see the kidnapper standing over her.

He backed off when she cautiously sat up, retreating to a far corner the room to go over his equipment. June closed her eyes again, too angry and scared to handle, thinking of what she might do instead of succumbing to the situation – after all, she hadn’t fought so hard for so long to just let this happen to her.

It was dark outside dingy windows, and the rampant, sticky heat had broken into a heavy rain and thunderstorm that blocked out most other sound. The kidnapper didn’t even look up when she struggled to her feet, bare knees scraping on the chipped tile floor, and the fact that he disregarded her so much was infuriating. Logically June knew that there wasn’t much she might be able to do against someone who was obviously a skilled fighter, especially in a world full of heroes and villains.

But at the very least, he could respect the grit that had gotten her so far.

He did look up as she rushed him, screaming hoarsely, swinging her tied fists like a club in front of her. Caught her as her violent charge knocked over his table and easily subdued her. The forearm held across her throat was warm flesh under the black uniform, but June was staring at the gleaming cybernetic arm across her stomach.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Разве ты не видишь, что я читаю? Перейти ебут вокруг в другом месте.” means "Can't you see I'm reading? Go fuck around elsewhere." 
> 
> ... Or at least that's what Google Translate told me. Feel free to correct what I'm sure is terrible Russian. Meanwhile, Natasha pulls no punches.
> 
> Well, I definitely Britta'd it by not updating for awhile, but at least we got to find out a little more about June's past. Even I didn't know her dad was a governor! Meanwhile, Steve's gonna get on this hunt pretty fast because I'm starting to feel bad about keeping him dangling for so long. I don't really know how this turned out, but hopefully it's okay? Just let me know one way or the other, please?
> 
> Yeah, it's been a tough couple of months for me. I know this isn't much of an excuse, and I have kind of been resisting telling people who actually know me IRL, but I've spent my time struggling in more ways than one lately. Somehow it feels safer to tell you all instead. 2014 has not been good to me so far, and I haven't really had any sort of urge to write for a long time. Except that guilt kept reminding me that this next chapter needed to get out, so I pushed myself to start and just kind of fell into it once I got started. Sometimes the best thing about writing is that you can definitely fake it till you make it.


	7. dead man with a museum exhibit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky just doesn't know, and it frustrates June. Meanwhile, Sam's vigilance pays off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! Woooo! I am doing NaNoWriMo again this year, so I've been mostly working on that this month. It's a lot of work! But there's always considerable guilt to get this thing updated that pushes me to work on this too! And sometimes, really, it's good to switch it up and take a break from a novel that you're working on constantly (and honestly are beginning to hate a little bit).
> 
> Hope you enjoy!
> 
> (Warning: light use of the f-bomb in this chapter, just so you know.)

June screamed and heaved herself backward into the man holding her, the metal arm across her stomach and biceps scaring he to the point that she couldn’t control her reactions. This was superheroes and villains shit, this was too extreme, this was something she shouldn’t be involved in anymore, this was –

Her captor hauled her over to an overturned chair, set it upright with a conspicuously heavy hand and sat her down with a barely contained growl. “Stay.” He commanded her with a snarl, and then, of all things, turned his back on her and moved to clean up his scattered weapon pieces and equipment. “Stay.” He repeated over one shoulder when the chair creaked as she gripped the edges of the seat hard enough to bleach her knuckles white.

For one incredulous moment, June couldn’t believe that had just happened – that her kidnapper actually expected her to just sit there on a little fold-up metal chair like a good dog and obey him. The long, tangled hair that hung over his neck and the soft cursing as he examined his weapons for any dents seemed vaguely… familiar? But that couldn’t possibly be right, she thought as she stood up, picked up her folding chair, and swung it from the side at her assailant.

The element of surprise had to be on her side, right?

Her kidnapper reached out and caught the metal chair with his equally metal hand before it even made contact with his body, without even looking in her direction, wrenching it out of her grasp and tossing it carelessly to the side. It skidded to a stop against a far wall, and June stood helpless with no more options as hands clamped down on her shoulders.

Picked up and physically set on the nearby table, June immediately jumped down and struggled when she was immediately caught again. “Goddamn it doll!” Her attacker boomed, frustrated, and set her forcefully back on the table. “Just stay still!”

June reached up blindly until her fingers caught the edge of something and tugged on it until it came flying off. His mask.

* * *

 

Somehow, the Winter Soldier had never intended for it to come this far. Buck had never intended for it to come this far. So if he was trying to deny the connection he felt with the Brooklyn waitress that he’d just kidnapped the night before, he was doing a piss poor job of it.

Buck’s fingers worked over his handgun meticulously while his thoughts were a thousand miles away. Or more precisely, about thirty feet away, wrapped around the woman that lay unconscious on the warehouse floor, her head pillowed on her arms like she was at a sleepover. The very thought of her waking up and seeing what he was, knowing what he’d done for decades, and the tarnish that covered his soul, sent him into a nosedive even as weapon after weapon was cleanly stripped and rebuilt with maximum efficiency.

The Russians had trained him well, after all – even for the possibility of working under extreme mental duress, despite the fact that they’d never anticipated it in the field. After all, what mental stress could possibly befall a golem?

But June was beginning to stir – he knew because her breathing was no longer as slow or steady as it was when she was deeply asleep –  and if he’d timed correctly how long she’d been out, she would be just coming to the end of another R.E.M. cycle. A conscious June meant that it was time to face the reality of his dependence, because she would have questions and it had recently become abundantly clear that his world had narrowed down to three simple facts:

1\. Hodge had seen and recognized him, and his sudden death after their encounter was sure to bring what was left of SHIELD and the Avengers to the area.

2\. He could no longer be around the diner and June because the fear of discovery was too great.

3\. He could not face the reality of no longer having June in his life.

His trainers in Russia, and probably Natalia too, would have been disappointed to see the unsurpassed Winter Soldier brought down by his obsession with a woman. Lesser men fell victim to that sort of thing, but not him, not the ghost. Except they were wrong, that was exactly what had happened and now there he was – struggling to pull himself together into one cohesive person from all the jagged pieces of Bucky Barnes and Winter Soldier that were left behind on the floor – feeling nervous sweat trickle between his shoulder blades at the prospect of finally facing the woman he was devoted to as he was.

Some would have bluntly called it for what it could be: love. And perhaps the part of him that was still Bucky Barnes did consider it so – not wanting to be without her, taking comfort from her calm confidence that it would all work out, the knowledge that she’d suffered as he had and come out the other side better for it. But his other half did not love, and besides, for someone like the Winter Soldier, devotion, obsession meant much the same thing. It meant being loyal, it meant stepping in front of a bullet for her, it meant taking her where she would be safest – most of all accepting that she might be considered a weakness by his enemies, and instead of eliminating her and therefore the threat, he protected her by any means possible.

June was beginning to take too long to wake up, not a good sign, and Buck advanced on her slowly, wary of scaring her while still in his combat suit. He almost bent down to touch her, but stopped himself before getting too far. Any touch would test his sore and ragged control – comfort too much for him to resist. His handlers had prepared him for sex, hard and desperate seduction, the pleading of a woman for her life as she opened her legs – they’d never prepared him to resist kindness.

Instead he nudged her with his boot, and that was safe enough – as she shifted and started to open her eyes. “Get up. We’ll be leaving soon.” He told her, except that her face scrunched up as if she didn’t understand him, and he realized that it had come out in a jumble of Russian and improper English. This was a mistake, too much contact, too much stimulation, too much, _too much_ , TOO MUCH –

Buck had to breath in deeply under his mask and walked away to clear his mind. The space would give them both time to adjust as he cleaned his instruments – even just listening to her soft movements was nice enough, chipped away here and there at the wall of the Winter Soldier. So it was to her credit that the sound of her charging him like a madwoman was surprising enough that she knocked over all his things and almost got him too. Pride rose inside Winter Soldier’s chest, and Buck’s too – she was strong, she was no mouse like he’d first thought.

That was good.

There was a chair a few feet away in which he’d sat all night, hands wrapped around a semi-automatic, keeping watch from afar over the vulnerable companion curled in the corner, not daring to come any closer for fear of losing the best vantage point of the room. He set her down in it as quickly and gently as possible, and withdrew to care after his weapons. Buck didn’t dare allow himself to relish the feel of finally holding her close before he set her in the chair – his back would be turned to her, yes, but should anything happen she’d still be close enough that he could protect her. “Stay.” He said, and was pleased when this time it came out in English.

The chair creaked a few seconds later and he grit his teeth at the sound. It was good that his кукла was a fighter, that she rebelled and struggled and didn’t give in. But there was a time and a place for everything, and the power of being patient was just as important as the fight. She’d have to learn that, too. “Stay.” He ground out again, setting the table back up and picking up the closest of the scattered guns – a couple of glocks.

June stood up behind him, her knees popping as she straightened up and alerting him to exactly what was going to happen. Vibration from impact traveled up his metal arm as he caught the chair she swung at him, the pressure jolting through him, and even if it was pleasing that she was fighter – _he needed to get these things done_. There was no time, didn’t she understand that?

“Goddamn it doll!” The words rushed out of him impatiently, reminding him of a time when he’d said something similar to someone else. The blond runt? These memories always taunted him like phantom limbs just out of reach, forever frustrating, but that was an issue for another time. “Just stay still!”

For the briefest second she froze, eyes wide and clear like he was seeing to the bottom of a lake, staring at him as if she recognized him. But the moment passed, and June reached out to strike him, curled fingers just catching the edge of his mask. A moment of blind panic washed through him – he wasn’t ready for his, he didn’t want to give up the safety and privacy of the mask just yet – but she tugged and it was too late and suddenly his face was bare.

* * *

 The Winter Soldier. _Buck_ was the Winter Soldier. Buck was James Buchanan Barnes. He was the man who helped bring down the Triskelion. The man she was still reading newspaper articles about. The dead man with a museum exhibit.

June hopped down from the table again and this time Buck didn’t interfere, in fact he backed away from her and kept his hands in plain sight as if to prove that he wasn’t a danger. Except he was, he was the Winter Soldier for Christ’s sake, he so obviously was a danger.

“You’re the Winter Soldier, aren’t you?” He didn’t respond, choosing instead to dip his head to his chest and look up at her through dark eyelashes. “Buck, I… I don’t understand. I just don’t understand.”

He didn’t look her in the eye. “Join the club, doll. Neither do I.”

Self-righteous fury flooded her. “You don’t understand? How could _you_ not understand?” He didn’t resist when the burning anger was just too much to hold inside and she pushed him, hard. June pushed him again. “You attacked me in my home! You kidnapped me! You disappeared for days on end! You worried me fucking sick and you don’t understand? How could that possibly be? How could you not understand?”

On the third push Buck caught her at the wrists and held them still, one hand warm and terribly human, the other cold and hard, with the soft clicking movement of metal plates shifting from palm to shoulder. “I don’t know what to tell you June, I don’t understand any of it! Nothing! I have nothing of my life left – nothing of myself left – it’s all gone. So no!” He seemed almost manic then, driven to the edge by a loss that was drowning him, every muscle in his body tight with the struggle to break the surface and find some way to survive.

A blaze of fear like she’d never felt before flickered steadily over her face, and he seemed to realize then that he was shouting brokenly at her, and her face was pale and pinched tight with a fear. The part that she thought was the Winter Soldier reacted first, and then the part that was Buck, and neither side relished her distress. In the silence that followed his sudden yelling, Buck breathed deeply, wrung to the core by it all, and leaned his forehead against June’s.

This was the closest they’d ever been to each other, face to face like this, and she held very still against him like he might startle at any sudden movement. Any adrenaline still left in her body from the fear of death transformed into a curiosity to see what it might feel like to kiss someone again. Buck pulled away before she could fall prey to that particularly untimely urge, and he backed up a few paces, finally turned to walk over to the nearest wall and slide down it to the floor. Even unconsciously, June noticed, he chose a spot that had a clear view of the rest of the room and was nearest to a weapon.

He just kind of sat there, with his hands held limply, palm up, in his lap. A lost man who was struggling to make sense of an entirely new world. “I don’t understand, doll, I don’t. I just knew that they were coming, and I had to keep you safe. You above all.”

“Who? Who is coming? After me? After you? Talk to me Buck, please.” She moved a few feet closer but didn’t trust herself to go any farther than that.

This was a new reality for June, and new person that she was meeting, though it suddenly explained so much about him; her guess about his past as a soldier had been at once so close to the truth and so far away from it. But he’d been this way for so long, blood on his shoes and the mud in which others died on his face*, it only seemed new because she hadn’t known to look for it before.

Buck looked up at her with this sudden fierceness, this awareness that might before have scared her silly. Maybe still did. The kind of dangerous intensity in his eyes that had spelled out so much tragedy in her previous life – except this time it wasn’t aimed at her, it was aimed at the far corner of the room. “Them.” He said, still looking at the corner. “It’s them. Hydra.”

* * *

 

“Steve? Steve!” Sam’s voice came over the wireless intercom pumped full of adrenaline and excitement. He’d gone out to patrol even in the storm because the rain felt good on his face, reminded him of what life was really like. “We’ve got a disturbance at the outskirts of Brooklyn. Looks like Hydra.”

Steve jolted out of bed with a start, already feeling his palms start to itch with the prospect of taking down some Hydra underlings. He’d been lying in bed, listening to the storm that raged outside and wondering if Bucky was listening to the same rainfall. It pattered on his expensive glass windows but still sounded like it was hitting the tin roof of the apartment they’d shared before life had hit them relentlessly. Somehow the thought that his lost friend was listening made it seem like they were close to a light at the end of the tunnel, even if so far, nothing had come of Nat’s lead on the waitress.

She’d flat out disappeared, no trace left behind, and that in itself was exciting – hinted at the involvement of a professional of Bucky’s caliber. That didn’t mean it was any less frustrating that the Avengers still hadn’t been able to track her down, even with the use of extensive, and probably highly illegal, camera phone scanning.

Sam didn’t even wait for him to respond, and both of them could hear other teammates snapping on gear and getting ready to go out. As it was, Steve was pulling on his uniform and wishing painfully that Bucky was there to make a joke about how skintight it was. ‘Soon.’ He thought of the good old days and of the small leeway the team was making. ‘Soon.’

It was Clint that asked, “Any sign of him?”

“It’s tough.” Sam’s voice crackled with interference, and they all listened hard for more, the whole team invested just as Steve was. “But I think so. Those agents are going down like dominoes.” More excitement. “Oh, wait, wait, I might have just seen the girl through a window.”

Natasha appeared in Steve’s doorway, already suited up and ready. “Waitress’ name is June Westlake. No priors, clean record, some troubling hospital reports, but that’s it.” She supplied into the comm., and raised an eyebrow like she was scolding him for not going fast enough.

“I knew it! I knew it!” Faint mechanized whirring in the background as Tony was… well, Tony. He’d never said any such thing, but no one pointed it out in an effort to get out the door without one of Stark’s famous Rich Man Temper Tantrums. “You doubted me, but didn’t I tell you? I knew that random girl would lead us right to him. I knew it!”

“Man,” Sam said, and Steve found himself grinning with this knowledge that he might soon have his childhood friend back. Soon, soon! “Shut the hell up**. Falcon out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that was Chapter 7! I hope you all enjoyed and thanks for reading! Every time I post one of these, I get really nervous that no one will like it, sometimes even to the point of nightmares, so I just want you all to know how much your reviews, and bookmarks, and likes, and subscriptions really mean to me. Thank you!
> 
> I kind of intended for there to be a fight scene in this chapter between Bucky and the Hydra agents, but since there's going to be a fight scene between Bucky and... others who shall remain nameless next chapter, I cut it in favor of an Avengers scene. Coming soon there will hopefully be much more of them than just these little inserts.
> 
> Also, bought the third anthology of Fraction's Hawkeye verse, this one all about Kate's adventures in CA. Who else thought it was amazing? *raises hand* Also, currently in love with the new Thor series, and with the new Captain America series. Just bought Captain America #1 in which Sam begins his tenure as the Cap, and he and Steve literally have an argument about frills. FRILLS. That's when I knew that I would love it.
> 
> * I took the liberty of paraphrasing the song "Broken" by Norah Jones.  
> ** Everyone's favorite Falcon line from Cap 2.
> 
> As always, if you liked something, tell me! If you didn't like something, tell me that too! Thanks for reading!


	8. this isn't super smash bros. (1/3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 2-parter. Bucky fights Hydra. Bucky also fights the National Guard. Bucky also also fights the Avengers. Clint complains about Super Smash Bros. and Donkey Kong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this is awkward. 
> 
> Been awhile since I updated, but never fear, it'll all get done! The holidays have just been a little... crazy, to say the least. Hastily edited, but I hope you'll all enjoy and let me know if anything jumps out at you. I meant to update on the first of the year, but ended up deciding that updating in time for the Agent Carter premier (!!! so good !!!) was good too.
> 
> This is a two-part chapter, and hopefully the next part will be out soon.

_the present_

“Man, Captain America still can’t text for shit.” Tony complained with most of his usual vim, but anybody looking at him could see that though he wasn’t injured or terribly battle fatigued, his face was lined with the weariness that only constant emotional stress could wring from a human. This particular battle had gone on for long enough, and two days longer to boot. He wanted an end to all this drama, selfishly for his own sake, but also for the team’s. For Steve.

There was only so much a man could take, after all.

And when had he started to use the phrase, ‘to boot?’ That was practically grandma status.

Tony stood as one man in a four-guard pattern around a highly sedated Winter Soldier, whose face was clenched in anger even when knocked out cold. Though Iron Man had come out mostly unscathed, the others around him had been much less lucky. Or perhaps luckier, as the case may have been, since they had tangled with the Winter Soldier and had come out alive on the other side.

Barton’s bow had suffered some major damage, as well as his right shoulder; Banner had refrained from the fight for fear of losing too much control in such a small space, but his face was pulled tight with thin-lipped anger while he lifted a field bandage from the Soldier’s chest to look at a stab wound; Natasha and Sam looked mostly unhurt as they guarded the other side – they’d dealt almost exclusively with the small army of Hydra goons – but both agents equally looked as if they felt useless or lost; behind them, standing still and angry and the most damaged of them all, was Steve.

The Star Spangled Man with a Plan looked like someone had bombed the shit out of the heart of him, and then kicked his puppy.

Getting through the fight had been one thing, and then mechanically sending out a mass text message to all Tower occupants letting them know of their expected arrival, telling them to clear out had been another. But now there was nothing for the super soldier to do until the prisoner was successfully sequestered in a room that would survive his rages.

“James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky.” Steve’s voice was ragged as he came to stand next to his teammate, and Tony realized that some form of his thoughts had escaped his mouth. “Not the prisoner.”

“I gotcha Capsicle.” Tony cast sideways glances at the rest of the team, and then lastly at Steve, to see how fractured the man looked. It may have only been a small portion of inactivity, but for Captain America, it would be just long enough to drive him insane. And Tony wasn’t so sure that James Buchanan Barnes would be able to withstand it all when Steve’s pent up emotions came out in a rush of good-natured and painfully hopeful, ‘Here, let me show you what you used to be like.’

Nearby on another stretcher, the woman that was coming in with them, the waitress, groaned. Bruce had moved on to check her over, and when he looked up, his features had become grim. “We need to hurry. Now.”

* * *

 

_46 hours ago_

“Oh my God!” June hardly got the words out as Buck stretched to take her by the arm and yank her out of the way of an oncoming bolt of static covered blue energy. After Buck had pointed out their intruders, the suddenly uncovered enemy agents had stared at them like deer caught in the headlights for a brief, frozen moment in time before jolting into action. It was only her good luck that whomever this man was that she’d come to be close to had taken action a fraction of a second earlier.

“Stay down!” June caught those words as they were shouted at her through a mélange of coldly furious Russian, and hugged the wall behind her. Was she determined to show her kidnapper that she wasn’t some dog to be commanded? Yes. But foolish enough to attack the descendants of the Hydra Deep Science division? No.

His first knife buried itself in the vulnerable throat of one agent, and June watched a second weapon slide down from the wrist guards she’d never noticed that he wore. Even though she knew, now, that she’d unwittingly befriended a Soviet asset and assassin that was wanted nearly the world over, and even though that asset had abducted her for reasons still unclear, it was this demonstration that proved his past. Proved the real danger.

For she’d never seen anyone move so quickly or efficiently into battle with what hardly amounted to a weapon in the face of such intimidating military technology. But Buck was good, better than they were, and he’d dispatched coldly and silently with the majority of the first wave by the time that the second came in through the old cracked window closest to her.

A smaller gun had skittered over to the side in all the commotion, and June made a grab for it as what seemed like an endless number of Hydra agents came streaming into the old warehouse. The weapon was shaking in her hands, because this kind of thing had never been her scene in years past, but it was comforting to know that at least there was some small measure of protection between her and the others. She pointed it directly into the face of the nearest agent, standing only a few feet away, and faced down a much bigger gun in her own face. The rest of the black-clad team had formed a loose ring around the pair, and keeping an eye on Buck was becoming more and more difficult.

There was a suspended moment in which neither of them moved, time stopped still – the kind of crystalline tension in which the only movement was dust motes in the air – and then the Hydra agent struck, deftly flipping their gun to the side in order to use it as a blunt object. The butt of the weapon cracked into the concrete wall, just exactly where her head had been only moments before; June ducked down and hugged herself together, managing to get a single, panicked shot directly into the chest of her attacker.

It was a lucky shot too, only successful because the agent was so close to her, otherwise she’d have gone far and wide. But instead of falling away, the agent only grunted and palmed a bloodless chest with their free hand, just checking that bullet proof armor had held up. The gun was wrenched from June’s hand as other Hydra agents rushed in, one on each side grasping her biceps so tightly she thought her bones might break under the pressure.

In the chaos and confusion and tumult of a dizzying, unfocused struggle, June could hear jumbled words and orders and what sounded like shouts for reinforcements. She was fighting and lashing out and lunging and kicking, but it was obviously doing little good but to irritate the Hydra agents. For one brief, blessed moment as the agents hauled her upward, her eyes met Buck’s as he surged toward her group, tearing through obstacles like little more than tissue paper.

There was hope there, that Buck and June Against the World would make it out of this alive. There was always a chance, wasn’t there?’ June found herself hoping harder than ever before as someone with an electrified baton behind her whispered, “Hail Hydra,” and brought the weapon down brutally on her stomach.

If only she could delay them long enough, then he could-

There was a deafening roar as one of the warehouse walls opened up in explosion and a flood of soldiers, clearly not Hydra’s inevitably black clad agents, poured in.

* * *

 

_the present_

Yasha, Bucky, the Winter Soldier – Natasha’s head was spinning with the complicated cross-section of identities – began to struggle against his restrains in his sleep, and she put weight on his right shoulder and wrist to hold him down. Sam was doing the same on the left side, and his biceps and forearms were bulging with effort even though he was making some half-hearted crack about Tony. They were riding in the back of one of SHIELD’s tactical vehicles, sirens blaring, on their way to Stark Tower and a team of medical and psychological professionals.

From over the phone, Coulson had ordered transport to the nearest SHIELD-cleared hospital; but the genius, billionaire, philanthropist, and playboy had argued briefly that his facilities were better equipped, and then hung up on the Director.

She had to blink a few times, center herself far beyond the grunts of effort from Samuel Thomas Wilson, the terse orders from Robert Bruce Banner, the argument between Clint Barton and Anthony Edward Stark that was ultimately doing nothing to distract either of them, the tense silence radiating from Steven Grant Rogers that was louder than all of the others combined. Natasha could see the names scrolling past in her mind’s eye as she catalogued and observed, but all that stuttered to a halt when she finally arrived at the man on the stretcher.

This man had been her lover. He’d been her trainer, her taskmaster, her partner. He’d been dead, a ghost.

A ghost she’d cut from her life as deftly and thoroughly as any other weakness. Yet there he was, blood everywhere and teeth gnashing together, sweaty and broken, screaming not for her but for the waitress. The waitress.

“June! June!” He was calling hoarsely, though his eyes weren’t open and he couldn’t have been aware of the familiarity of his Natalia’s hands on his body. “June!” And the rising tide of jealous possession would have to be tamped down quickly and brutally if she wanted to keep her head in all of this.

If she allowed it, she might find herself examining flashes of memory – bruises, the electric strike of widow’s bites, the heady scent of sex, the illicit pleasure, the blood of combat, the—

“Nat, Nat,” She found herself looking up at Clint’s concerned face, finally feeling centered again. Usually Clint did that, calmed her down. “What’s up? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good.”

* * *

 

_45 hours, 40 minutes ago_

Almost there. Almost there.

Buck could feel sweat dripping down his face, feel blood slick on the floor and on his hands. He pretended that he could feel the pounding of June’s heart as he grasped her wrist and pulled and pushed and defended her through a melee of weapons and limbs and enemies, but that was just a particularly erstwhile thought.

She was becoming more and more of a weakness, a flailing, soft hearted passenger that would only ever slow him down – but Buck found himself more willing to cut off his other arm than let her hand go.

This new enemy he found himself fighting wasn’t much of a challenge, particularly. If alone and well-equipped, he could have beaten them soundly and gone on his way undamaged. Even unequipped it would have been easy enough. From their uniforms he saw they were National Guard, and the questions lingered: who had sent them? How had they even known where to go?

As it was though, they were just enough of a hindrance that the Hydra agents were beginning to gain an upper hand. Fifteen, twenty feet maybe and double that number in National Guard along with several Hydra agents between them and a possible exit. Buck shoved June towards the nearest wall and side stepped a baton neatly, dispatching another agent as yet another group of combatants entered the warehouse.

This time it was easy enough to identify them – the Avengers.

There was the one called Iron Man, and with him Hawkeye and the Falcon. The one called Thor was missing, he noted. A flash of red and the one they called Black Widow appeared, the sight of her sending his brain into a painful spiral of memories that had only since disintegrated but were still fighting to come back and torment him further. And some feet away from him, working steadily closer and closer, swarmed as if with black ants, was Captain America.

“What the fuck is this? Super Smash Bros. Melee Version featuring Donkey Kong?” One of them, the one called Hawkeye, was calling to the others, but no one had enough breath to answer back.

Buck fought mechanically then, beginning to feel as if the frost was overtaking his mind and forcing him into the wiped mindset that he’d occupied for some seventy odd years. There was suddenly nothing but the haze and the fight, the threat of the Avengers. It was the first time he’d fallen into the emptiness in some time, leaving him defenseless like an addict against heroin as blank purpose swarmed through him. It was like he was a shore laid bare by low tides, overwhelmed and helpless against a tidal wave that swept through and broke everything over again.

For a few moments all that was left was Attack. Target. Dispatch. Move on. Attack. Target. Dispatch.

It would become a most closely guarded secret to James Buchanan Barnes in the coming years, a shame he’d never share with anyone but that would torture him relentlessly and without mercy: for those few moments when he returned to a time of simplicity and control and calm that only being shackled in every way could inflict, there was an underlying sense of relief. 

Buck was tired of making decisions, tired of being worn down, tired of feeling broken apart and scattered to the far corners by emotions he hadn’t coped with in too long and a world that had moved on without him. _Relieved_.

“There’s the girl! Jane, uh, June!” Buck snapped out of the blank space in time to focus on Iron Man’s face and efficiently brutal blaze of attack. “Get her!”

Like a burn, a wildfire that razed through his emptiness, shame and pain and anger and utter terror came back to Buck, and they hurt. They hurt badly. Especially when he spared one small moment to find June again in the chaos to see her half-guarded by the Black Widow, an expression of startle and awe and fright on her face.

The woman called Natalia blinked for one precious second when he came face to face with her, obviously unsure what he would do and allowing him the opportunity to either join her or oppose her. There was a stiffness in her left shoulder, the remnants of a recent injury, that she hadn’t been able to push past or disguise well enough, and he used that to his advantage when striking.

It didn’t matter who they were – if they were going after what was his, they were no ally of the Winter Soldier’s.

Natalia cried out as he attacked, yet her counterstrike was no less powerful, her reflexes no less deadly. Out of the corner of his eye, Buck could see June swinging the butt of one of his semi-automatics at the head of a soldier – it had fallen in a corner when she initially charged him – but knew that she wouldn’t be able to last much longer in such tight quarters.

Rather than pursue a kill shot further and take the so-called Avengers apart one by one, Buck worked to maneuver himself around the Widow and place himself between her and the broken window that would lead to some semblance of deliverance. He might have been able to last long enough, but June never would.

Luck rather than skill offered Winter Soldier a chance to disappear though – as a Hydra agent leapt out of the fray and attempted to smash Black Widow’s skull in. And in the split second she took away from him to deal with the utter fool, he slung a wilting June over one shoulder and leapt out of the second story window to the broken, rusted fire escape below.

* * *

 

_the present_

June was vaguely aware that she was in a moving vehicle.

And she knew this because every time it took a corner too sharply and what sounded like plastic boxes tumbled to the floor, a very frustrated someone called the driver every name in the book.

There was pain too, and it was hard to focus on anything, much less stay awake. It felt like something was crusted over her eyelashes, and she blinked her eyes open to see a bright, white light that nearly blinded her with its intensity. Almost immediately someone leaned over her, speaking softly but firmly, and it took an uncomfortably long time for her to be able to focus on competent, calm features and a mess of curly, black hair.

“Now hold still, I’m just going to be starting an IV.” The man’s voice went in and out as June struggled to concentrate, and she rather thought that he was almost trying to joke with her, like that, of all things, would put her at ease. “I’m not really this kind of doctor, so yo-“ Her hearing was full of white noise like a bum tv channel. “-not any extra tongue depressors.”

Her arms ached, but she managed to reach up and grab at the man, aiming badly and colliding accidentally with his glasses. For some reason that she couldn’t remember, her knuckles were… bloody? She felt like someone was missing, someone to ask about.

“I need you to stay awake, can you do that June? Stay with me here.”

There was something she needed to ask the man, June labored to think, she just couldn’t remember what it was… The vehicle took another sharp corner, the man swore again, and maybe it would be okay if she just closed her eyes… just for a moment…

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the lovely kudos and comments! I really appreciate them and hope you keep 'em coming! I'm a little unsure about this chapter, feeling insecure as per usual, but I hope it meets your standards!
> 
> If you feel like bugging me about writing, you can find me on tumblr - my handle is the same one I have here.
> 
> Meanwhile, I shall get back to the AMAZING Agent Carter premier!


	9. this ain't super smash bros. (2/3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *author feels overwhelming shame at late update*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not even going to start with excuses. I'm just going to say that I'M SORRY. HERE HAVE AN UPDATE. 
> 
> PLEASE COME BUG ME ON TUMBLR SO I WILL UPDATE FASTER. PLEASE GOD.

_74 years, 10 months ago_

“I love this place, you know runt?”

_‘You’re the answer to my every prayer, darling, who wouldn’t love you? Who wouldn’t care?’*_

“Yeah, me too.” Steve glanced over at Bucky and grinned, sticking his hands in his trouser pockets and ducking his head when two girls from class meandered by.

Buck, by contrast, smiled toothily at them and sent a sort of halfway salute. “Afternoon, ladies.” He was just old enough to really begin to appreciate the opposite sex, as it were, and just young enough that none of his charming advances quite came off as really serious enough yet, like a young boy mimicking his older brother’s moves. “See,” He started, turning to Steve. “That’s why this place is great. It’s crawling with dames.”

They were standing in Pierson General Store, hazy and warm in the late spring and filling rapidly with kids their own age, all out of school for the day. This was the rush hour, full of customers with their perfumes, their colognes, and their trampling feet kicking up dust – Steve’s chest was beginning to tighten in an impending asthma attack – but that would have meant returning to the orphanage, so he kept it to himself. At the front of the store, shopkeepers were frantically trying to fill all the orders as fast as they possibly could, and kids were lined up around the counter with purchases of gum and candy cigarettes.

_‘You’re the dream that dreamers want to dream about, you’re the breath of spring that lovers gadabout, are mad about.’_

Steve hefted a pack of the sugary candies in his hands himself, as if to test the weight or perhaps to imagine how good it might feel to actually be able to buy himself a pack for once. He put them down quickly enough before the temptation began to feel too strong. “This place is great for more than that, and you know it you mug. I feel like we’ve been coming here forever.”

They probably had, actually. Three stories full of anything that might tempt the odd teenager or passerby. Pierson’s was special in that it was convenient to both their school and thei- the orphanage. Sometimes it was difficult to keep himself from claiming the orphanage with the possessive in his head and speech, like giving in and doing so would somehow make it more of a place he belonged.

Two girls brushed by them on their way into a Voice-O-Graph, and Bucky paused for admiration. “This place is gonna be around forever, Steve.” He said, breathing in deeply and sighing with equanimity. “I can feel it.”

_‘Who wouldn’t love you, who wouldn’t buy, the west side of heaven, if you just winked your eye?’_

* * *

  _the present_

“Who’s the doc?” Natasha glanced over at Agents Hill and Coulson, both watching intently through the large glass window as a doctor in scrubs worked over the body of a fox-haired waitress.

“Jones. He’s a lecturer at CUMC but we have him on call for Avengers emergencies.”

“His specialty is related to the super serum field?” Coulson seemed intent, and he was typing something into his phone.

At the same time, Hill leaned further into the glass and asked, “Are we really considering the Winter Soldier to be an Avenger medical emergency?” She was looking into the adjacent trauma room where the Winter Soldier was being prepped by a team of nurses while Steve watched them with a stern expression on his face.  An expression that only grew darker as he heard Maria’s question from some feet away.

“Yes, of course.” Coulson didn’t hesitate to answer though he also didn’t look up from his phone, and Nat wondered if he replied so confidently for Steve’s own sake or because it was actually the truth.

One of the nurses shrieked, and they all jumped reflexively from slowly flooding adrenaline and anxiety. The Soldier had jerked, even in the throes of a drug induced deep sedation, and had reached out to grab the nearest nurse’s wrist. Steve was gently prying Yasha’s fingers from the nurse’s wrist as Nat came over; she looked to be in her late twenties or earlier thirties, certainly old enough to have had some experience in trauma centers, and was clearly thoroughly embarrassed.

“I’m fine, really. I don’t know why I did that.” The nurse, Kelly, was saying, and Natasha realized distractedly that Steve had been speaking to the woman in low tones.

“What do you think, Nat?” Steve looked up, and he was still holding the Soldier’s flesh hand in his own. He was cut up and dirty, worn through to the quick from more than just the fight they’d been in a mere hour ago. He looked afraid to hope, afraid of wanting something so badly that he scared it away. “Do you think we should put on some swing music? Do you think he can hear it?”

Natasha couldn’t say at all whether she thought Steve Roger’s Bucky Barnes, or her Yasha, or the waitress’ Buck, could hear anything at all. But Steve’s eyes reflected the ice, and the confinement, the abomination of a life he was rightly imagining his best friend had lived for so long, and the magnitude of what his friend had lost. Such a pervading sense of helplessness, like when you knew logically something wasn’t going to happen but you still in that back of your mind thought maybe it would, was achingly earnest. The pain was real, like he was trying to pull it out of Bucky and into himself by sheer will power and osmosis. “I think he can, Steve. Put it on.”

Black Widow didn’t hold much for pity or withholding the truth to soften the blow, but right then, for Steve and for Yasha, it was all she could offer.

* * *

 

_43 hours ago_

June stood shivering in the middle of yet another abandoned building, watching Buck go through a large cache of weapons and supplies. His back was turned to her, head bent down as he counted rounds and checked the focus on long-range rifles.  He’d taken off the top layer of his tactical suit, leaving behind black military pants and wet gray shirt that stuck to the skin of his shoulder blades and biceps. His damp hair was scraped back into a low ponytail, and a wet towel lay draped over a folding chair some feet away, dripping onto the floor.

At first, she’d thought that he was attempting to make himself look more like a noncombatant, an average Joe to be passed on the street. Except there was no disguising that metal arm, and really Buck made no attempt to. It bothered him though, she thought, because he kept angling it away from her like that simple action would camouflage it entirely. He’d never done that before around her, but then, he’d always worn long sleeves before. Maybe she was the first person he’d really exposed it to in-

“No food.” assassin interrupted her thoughts without turning around. “I’ll have to go out and get some, unless you’re not hungry.” This time he did turn his head, and the sharp profile of his face looked dark, dangerous, strangely possessive like a wolf with a rabbit it wanted to tend to, just for a little while. “Are you hungry?”

She had to shake herself of those ridiculous thoughts, because Buck had done absolutely nothing to make her feel like she was _his_ prey anymore. “No, I’m not. I mean, no thank you.”

By all rights, June should have been starving, but instead her stomach felt full of knots and fear and a desire to cling as close to the wolf as possible. Instead of wanting to run, and wanting to eat, and wanting to cry and seek help, she wanted to get warm, and get close, and have her Buck back.

 _‘I’d make a stupid rabbit_. _’_ She thought, hesitating before walking slowly over to the chair and picking up the wet towel. It was the only one she could see, and at least it was a little less soaked than she was. She grazed her fingers down one side of it. “Can I use your towel?”

Buck stopped then, set the weapon in his hands down on the scarred table, turned to look at her with this wary, sad expression on his face that almost made June feel like the wolf instead of the rabbit. He hadn’t said much since they’d burst into the new hideout, and with the Winter Soldier reflected so strongly in them June hadn’t expected him to.

“You don’t have to ask.” Face carefully blank, the sad expression wiped clean like it might be too much for him to handle anymore. “I… don’t want you to be afraid, doll.”

“I’m not afraid.” June said suddenly as Buck opened his mouth again. “Of you. I’m not afraid _of you_. I’m just… wet. And tired.”

Buck put down the weapon in his hands and stopped walking when only the chair separated them. “Towel.” He said after a moment of shared silent contemplation, of their eyes skirting each other almost nervously and June forcing herself to stop thinking about that night by the windowsill because what was wrong with her?

It was like trying not to think about sex while sitting in church, and then being suddenly unable to think of anything else.

“You’re not afraid at all?” Buck was back to his guns, not facing her again, whether by virtue of the checklist he seemed to be going through with all the dangerous things sitting around the empty warehouse or on purpose, she didn’t know. It seemed important that she clarify again.

June’s voice came out muffled at first, because she’d stopped to think about the National Guardsmen who’d appeared – who would be able to send them – and had rubbed the wet towel over her face like a cover. “I’m scared, yeah. There was a lot to be scared of going on back there, you were just not one of them.”

It might have seemed like a crazy way to feel, but it was the honest truth. And even if she knew this man was dangerous killer, she knew a little bit about The Bucky Barnes, had seen CNN reports here and there about he’d gone through – and besides, she knew him first as Her Buck. They were June and Buck Against the World, after all. And it was worth it, just to glimpse the tension dropping from his shoulders, from the ladder rungs of his spine when she said it.

* * *

 

_the present_

“Heard you were making the rounds.”

Sam looked up to see Steve leaning in the doorway of the hospital room, trying desperately to look less awkward than he clearly felt. He grinned and stretched out in the chair, not surprised that the captain had shown up sooner rather than later, “Got to fill my time somehow, don’t I?”

Steve flicked a glance over the iPod playing in a portable dock on the bedside table. “Trouble Man?”

“Worked wonders for you right?” Sam reached over to re-start the album from the beginning, and then slapped his hand down to catch the magazine sliding down his legs. They both froze as the woman in the bed moved restlessly, watching for any sign that she might be waking up.

A second chair was dragged over, and Steve dropped into it with a wince when the frame protested. “I heard you were over at the Operating Theater for awhile. Had them play Trouble Man for Buck while he was under the knife.” Sam watched as the national icon had to look down for a minute, gathering together words to tell him how grateful he was for the openhanded giving of friendship that had been extended to a torn up man only a few floors down. Instead, “Thanks.” Was all that made it out.

 Falcon understood though. He shrugged off the appreciation for immediately becoming available as a friend to a man he didn’t really know and with whom he’d come into contact with under the worst possible circumstances. Now he did the same for a woman who was a literal, total, and complete stranger, and thought nothing of it.

Sam remembered for a moment his father, “The Most Respected Minister in Harlem,” and his uncompromised faith in his fellow man, his certainty of a better tomorrow. Pride filled his chest, and he liked to think it came from watching eyes high above.**

“I don’t know about you man, but I feel like we’ve been through some shit now and you’d do the same for me, we’re family. Bucky is your family, and she’s… his? Must be. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, no problem, we’re family.”

The two soldiers sat in contemplative silence for a few moments, before Sam snapped his fingers and grinned, index finger pointing at an interested Steve. “Falcon Family.”

“Dear God.” Tony’s voice came over the room’s intercom, and it figured he’d been listening, the little shit. “Never call any of us that ever again.”

* * *

 

_38 hours ago – Steve_

“Captain Rogers, if I may,” JARVIS’ programmed speech pattern paused politely, waiting to see if there was any objection to be had. They’d retreated only an hour or two before, back to the tower after Bucky had gotten away because there was first aid to be seen to, and no one could bear to deal with those NGs any more than absolutely possible. “Money has been withdrawn from one of the accounts that has been red flagged by SHIELD. Mr. Stark believes that Mr. Barnes may be responsible.”

Steve found himself all over again grateful that JARVIS referred to Bucky as, ‘Mr. Barnes.’

“Security cameras see anything?” He picked his shield up from where it had been set down only half an hour before, and it felt unreasonably heavy on his back.

“Unfortunately not, sir. Agent Barton has already been dispatched with orders to observe and not engage unless necessary.”

The question as to how Clint knew where to go and why exactly Tony kept tabs on SHIELD financial intelligence was barely forming before the man in question burst over the intercom. Of course, his mouth was full at the time. “Themlkjekljlsfi trakldce klsdfkjoie-“

Pepper’s voice in the background. “Tony!”

Their resident genius, billionaire, philanthropist, playboy cleared his throat pointedly. “Heads up, there may ore may not be some StarkTech tracers on a few of the bills, Cap. Location traces to somewhere around Imlay Street*** in-“

“Brooklyn.” Steve knew. He just knew.

_‘You’re the answer to my every prayer, darling, who wouldn’t love you? Who wouldn’t care?’_

* * *

 

_37 hours ago_

June washed her hands in ice cold water in a little sink and wiped them dry on her much abused pajama pants. She was staring into a mirror – scratched, chipped, dusty with age – that was set above the little sink, and an inset porcelain tub and shower were clearly visible in the background. The mirror image of her had one eye bisected by a low hanging spider web and a disappointed, almost nauseous tilt to her mouth.

“Oh shut up.” She said, looking down and scratching an itchy nose on the curve of her shoulder.

In the other room Buck was making soft noises as he moved around and, she couldn’t believe she was saying this about a Soviet era assassin, puttered about. The noises, June decided, were for her benefit alone, and the idea that he thought to make the little things normal was a small, warm ember that glowed deep in her stomach.

Well, at least he was trying to make the little things normal. There wasn’t much anyone could do to turn this whole situational, and there was no other word for it, clusterfuck into morning coffee at the diner, but still it was… nice. Very nice, considering she was attributing this to a man who was, to re-iterate, a Soviet era assassin.

That was definitely a revelation that June had accepted and adapted to because she had to, because her life was in danger. But it seemed now every half hour or so to sneak back up on her like a snakebite or a bucket of cold water. How could _she_ be in the company of the _Winter Soldier_? For having not particularly kept up with the national news, the name had become more and more meaningful to her in the last few hours.

“Can I open a window?” June swung the bathroom door open with a loud sneeze and several sniffles. Buck was standing in a small, semi-ruinous kitchenette – he paused for a moment, looking at her red nose and watery eyes – considering their situation, then shrugged. He’d brought them to what looked like an abandoned department store, dusty and crumbling from long disuse. At one point someone had attempted to turn the top floor into a series of small apartments, but the project had clearly been abandoned halfway through, only a few of the units completed.

The aged wooden frame of a small window set high on the wall in the little bathroom creaked when she pushed on it, groaned so loudly as it finally gave way that June froze, heart beating in her throat, afraid that somehow their pursuers would hear the noise and come bursting in at any second. But the only the rain kept coming and no one appeared out of the semi-darkness except a pair of yowling, angry cats floors below.

“Here.” He stood in the door, metal muscles glinting in the barely there light of the bathroom. And for a glimmer of a second, the charming Buck she’d just begun to get to know appeared to break through the dust and old memories brought on by combat. “You look like you could do with a good wash, doll.”

June grimaced. “Not going to happen soon, I think. I have a feeling we’re lucky the sinks are still working. What is this place?”

Suddenly there was a black canvas bag in her hands, and Buck was walking away from her. She noticed that he wore a new looking shirt, because she now he was dry, and she could only make out the smooth, sliding shapes of his shoulder blades underneath the fabric rather than every muscle defined. To one side she could see that a section of the floorboards had been pulled out and a small, empty space was left behind. Another black canvas bag sat on the chipped tile counter, gapping open and sagging now that it had been emptied.

“Why would the National Guard get called to a situation already being handled by the Avengers?” He returned, and she saw his metal hand twitch toward the gun strapped high up on his thigh. Buck ran his flesh hand experimentally down one wall, and then turned around.

She’d been halfway through changing while he wasn’t looking, big menswear pants unbuttoned and just barely staying up on her hips and sleep shirt halfway over her head. Before it might have embarrassed her to have him see the old, too soft bra she slept in and the small pouch of her lower stomach that had never gone away no matter how ill fed she’d ever been. But now there were bruises on her stomach, legs, and arms; now she’d come through a firefight and lived; now she didn’t care.

“You’re leaving?” She was holding the old pajama shirt with some gym logo on it over her chest anyway.

Buck’s back was to her again, and for a moment she wished he hadn’t stopped looking at her. “You’re no share crop.” He said, passing through what had been designated the front door to the little apartment. “I’ll be back.”

“It’s my dad.” She says as he’s about to disappear from view. “He-“ But then the door closed on her, and she could only imagine him saying, _‘Later, doll.’_

The shirt Buck had left her with was old, but clean. Long sleeved and black, it was far too large hung on her body like an empty sack – but at least it was better than wet pajamas. She had to cinch the pants around her waist with an empty tactical belt from the bag even though she wasn’t the smallest of women, and took a moment to futilely rub at the dirt embedded into the bottoms of her feet.

Nothing to tie back her tangled mess of hair though, and considering the way Buck let his hair go, why was she surprised? June looked through empty drawers in the bathroom, finding only one neglected hairpin and nothing else. A quick, cautious search through his bag similarly yielded nothing. And when hesitantly searching the hallways, it occurred to her that she could no longer hear the fighting cats.

She could no longer hear anything else but the falling rain.

The hair on the back of her neck stood on end, and June felt overly conscious of herself and her movements: watched, observed, not alone. A board creaked off to the side and she was almost too afraid to look. But maybe, maybe it was Buck?

It was Captain America.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * “Who Wouldn’t Love You?” by The Ink Spots
> 
> ** All-New Captain America #1; Remender, Immonen, Von Grawbadger, Gracia
> 
> ***MCU cannon holds that Steve’s apartment in the 30s/40s was actually further north, closer to the Manhattan Bridge. But let’s just pretend, for the sake of this story, that the orphanage was more southerly and then they moved to that apartment, okay? Okay.
> 
> Originally I intended for this chapter to be the end of the Bucky and June on the Run Arc, but... that didn't happen, as I'm sure you can see. I really struggled with where to end this chapter, but eventually I decided that I didn't want to shortchange the next chapter by making this one too unwieldy. Next chapter tho, for sure guys. FOR SURE. I hope you like it, I hope you're all still with me?
> 
> As usual, tell me what you liked, tell me what you didn't like. Inquiring minds would like to know. And please, may I reiterate, I need your guilt mongering to make me update faster! I'm latemarch over on tumblr - please come and bug me.


	10. this ain't super smash bros. (3/3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shit goes down basically.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you would all be so kind as to take a very quick look at the end of Chapter 9 before reading this, Chapter 10, that would be awesome! I made a small adjustment with major implications to the very end of it - literally like the paragraph - that transitions into this chapter!

_36 hours ago_  
  
For one brief moment, June stared Captain America down. And then he began to hold one arm up, an attack – a plea – she didn’t know, she just ran.

He was following her, June was sure, because it wouldn’t make sense for him not to – except by some small miracle she actually managed to make it to Buck. No unnaturally large hands grabbing her back, like so many times before. No one shouting her name or grasping at anything they could get of her, even if that was a shred of a t-shirt or a few strands of hair. Just her hands, at the end of the line, digging too deep from adrenaline and panic into Buck’s shoulder.

Buck stood quiet by the apex of an obviously ailing staircase bannister, not reacting beyond the tensing of his shoulders and the turning of his head when she dashed into the room. He appeared to be listening for something, once she slowed down enough to really see his face, eyes dark and brow clenched with concentration. “Buck?” It was a whisper, but it still came out breathy and loud somehow.

He nodded sharply, somehow conveying that he wanted her to continue but disapproved of her volume.

“Buck?” This time much softer and more tentative, for all that she was still breathing heavily and her heart and head were pounding together and there was a super soldier coming for them. She felt the muscles of his shoulder clench and start to vibrate strangely, realizing that she’d held onto his non-biological arm without evening realizing it.

She didn’t let go. “Buck, I…uh… well, him.” It was surprisingly difficult to get out, that she’d encountered Captain America and instead of putting her in superhero jail he’d let her run straight into the arms of the Winter Soldier.

Saving her the words, Captain America stood in the shadows of the doorway, his shield mounted on his back, his face impassive but his eyes sharp and all-observing. He’d been the watching them, and it was obvious that he’d seen and picked out all the details: the way Buck tracked her every movement, the grip she had on his arm, the closeness of their bodies, the shared heat between them in the cold building, his acceptance of her into closeness and vulnerability. It seemed to signify something to the Captain that June couldn’t even begin to fathom in just the few short seconds that she had before Buck aimed a knife at the other man’s heart.

It was obvious that he hadn’t actually expected the attack to hit the mark, that in actuality Buck used it as cover to step in front of her and move them both back because she was a non-combatant that needed protection. “Stay quiet, stay close.” His mouth hardly moved as he spoke, and the whispers were almost obliterated even to her as an arrow whistled past them and embedded itself into the back wall of the hallway.

Buck didn’t wait to see who their third combatant would be – he slid into conflict with Captain Rogers as quickly and quietly and efficiently as hoarfrost swallowing the Siberian plains. When Hydra attacked, what followed was usually a swift flurry of movement, of fury, with no concern for noise or secrecy once their cover was blown – raw power. What followed when Hawkeye and Captain America and the Winter Soldier collided was substantially different.  

In one impossibly quick movement, Hawkeye dropped down from the staircase leading to the next story up, nowhere near where the arrow had originated from, his bow held forward as some sort of shield against a blow from Buck’s weaponized arm. Captain America fought on the defensive, and to June’s untrained eyes it seemed that he was attempting to draw Buck’s attention in his direction, leaving Hawkeye free to apprehend from behind.

It wasn’t going very well for them. Hawkeye and Captain America collided violently as they were thrown into each other, and Winter Soldier circled them warily, waiting for the next attack while he kept one eye on her. The lights flickered as the archer began to draw and loose arrows, rapid fire, and suddenly June found herself facing Captain America one on one, for the second time.

Standing several feet away still, he looked apologetic and not particularly aggressive, but still far more than she might ever be able to handle. “Just come with us.” He was saying, in a softer voice than she might have expected. “We want to-“  June’s hand clenched  around a barely connected, rotted piece of wooden railing, yanking it free before she had a chance to think about what she was doing. The surprised look on the captain’s face would have been comical if he wasn’t dodging a hastily thrown, splintering piece of wood.

She had a second piece of banister held at the ready when Buck slid in between them while Hawkeye twisted and writhed in the background trying to wriggle out of the bow that had been shoved around his shoulders and scrape some sort of black goo from his face.

“Bucky, it’s me, kid. Try to think back, Bucky. Think!”

Buck ignored the man with a lifetime of sadness pouring out of his mouth and turned his head towards June, exposed a faction of vulnerability as he said very quietly, “Стой, где вы находитесь. Пребывание за меня.” And at first she didn’t understand, could only watch his lips pronounce each word in a slushy sounding spurt of Russian, until he repeated, “Stay.”

An arrow struck Buck in the right shoulder.

* * *

 

_the present_

Buck woke up and found himself swimming through the hazy, oily sensation of medication and sedation. He fought back the impressions of cold metal tongs pressed into his forehead and the tang of metal on his tongue and electrical shock of repair work being done on his arm to hear a faint, consistent, beeping sound.

He could hear someone else breathing in the far corner; they were rustling through some papers and smelled of chemicals and peppermint mouthwash. Buck ignored them – the handlers usually gave him a few moments after each resurrection to come to and organize his consciousness. This time he organized his body and outlying surroundings instead.

The Soldier counted several ribs that had once been broken but had already healed to mere fractures. Puncture wounds in the right shoulder and thigh. Lacerations on his back and hip, deep and ugly and healing at a slower rate. Severe burns, still healing on his chest, that brought back memories of a Hydra bomb. His head pounded with a ferocity would not be matched for some time, and his eyes were taped over with gauze.

It occurred to Winter Soldier that he’d never before been awoken while still healing from a previous mission. This new threat to Hydra must have been more frightening than usual for them to be so desperate.

This time there was cold metal pressed into his wrists, and it seemed strange that he could specifically pick out the chill of his shackles while coming out of a cold freeze. He could feel the heat of overhead lights, new and so blindingly white that he could see their flares through the gauze and his eyelids. Sterile chemicals burned his nose, uncomfortably familiar for a Hydra base.

He could hear the stranger’s footsteps as they came closer to the bed, and their voice was much softer than was typical for a Hydra doctor. “I’m reaching over now to remove the covers on your eyes. Hold still, please.”

There was the uncomfortable pull of tape on his skin, and then the bright white-blue light of LEDs flooded his vision, like he’d looked directly into the sun. The first thing he could focus on was the stranger, who was shrugging as if by habit, his face slowly lightening. “I keep telling them, I’m not that kind of doctor, but they refuse to listen.”

It was obviously clear that this man was no Hydra agent – the soft center inside was far too distinct – but that did not necessarily mean he no longer had to watch out. There were any number of unsavory agencies who might like to get their hands on a serum-enhanced fighter: the US government, for one; Chaos; RAID; Spectre… And in Buck’s experience, one kind of doctor was just about as ethical as the other, no matter what they said.

Vividly, he remembered the caduceus that was pinned to the white coats that each Soviet doctor wore.

“We thought you’d be angry, that’s why they sent me.” The man continued, ruffling his hair and proving himself more perceptive than he appeared. “Well, Clint and Tony thought you’d be a robot." 

“Close enough.” His throat was dry and coarse, and while the words seemed friendly enough on their own, the tone in which they were offered implied the kind of grave warning that might make the hardest fighter hesitant.

The doctor seemed to find great importance in what he said next, dark eyes looking Buck down directly. “You’re just a man, through and through. No robot. No monster.” The unspoken, ‘human,’ hung between them, and it seemed that both of them were thinking of how exactly that might not be an improvement upon the other titles. “I’m Dr. Banner, primarily in research. My official title, according to Darcy, is science!bros.” He said the last bit deadly serious but there was a twinkle of humor in his eyes that Buck wasn’t used to seeing directed at him.

“Where is she? Where is… June?” Westlake, but Buck hesitated to give them her full name, hesitated to give them anything they might be able to use. 

Banner’s face stayed impassive. They were neither unknowing of her name, nor were they surprised that he had been with her upon her capture. “She’s resting just down the hall.”

Buck’s arms jerked of their own accord against the bands around both wrists, and he played it off as if it had been intentional. He felt the muscles in his face tighten under the doctor’s scrutiny, the pressing understanding of every other doctor he’d ever met simmering in the back of his mind, and thought that there hadn’t ever been a time before in which he’d lost so much control over himself. June would understand – or she’d try to, and that was what mattered.

June. It was the unfamiliar sting of failure in his gut that kept her on his mind, he thought.

Dr. Banner was no stranger to keeping it cool in tense situations it seemed – he refused to flinch under a hooded, angry stare that had floored lesser men – and it was interesting to note sparks of color, like radioactive slime, hovering around each pupil. This, it was finally apparent, was no mere Bruce Banner, this was the green monster.

After all, there was no better babysitter for the Winter Soldier than the Hulk. 

* * *

 

_35 hours, 5 minutes ago_

Eyes locked on a spot over the top of her head, Buck broke the metallic arrow shaft in half with his left hand, close to the point where it was buried in his chest, and then used the shaft as an impromptu weapon against his opponents. He fought abruptly, hard and brutal in a way that kept both Captain America and Hawkeye on their toes, and it was taking the both of them to keep him occupied. June watched as Winter Soldier planted a foot directly on the archer’s chest and shoved him back several feet, directly into the path of Captain America’s shield, which he managed to duck only by the skin of his teeth.

Dust was rising to a storm cloud around them, hovering in the air as the fighting continued. June’s eyes were just beginning to sting, and she was having trouble seeing through the light of the street lamps outside, flickering faster and faster like some sort of strange fight club rave. Old windows capped each end of the long hallway, and scuffling sounds were coming from the one closest to her, people climbing up the side of the building, and June backed further away, feeling exposed from every angle.

She was looking for a way out, a solution, when someone else caught her eye – June rubbed at her stinging eyes to confirm what she was seeing. Across the building and through the flickering lights and disco effects, she saw clearly two figures silhouetted in a broken window. They were dark, hulking shapes – strong and thick and dangerous above all. The gun outlines were clearly visible, held loosely in the hands of the taller watcher. They were observing:  to learn, to figure out when the joints would be weak and it would be the most opportune time to strike. Her first instinct was to tell Buck – tell Buck, he’ll fix it, her brain supplied unhelpfully – but he was clearly busy and in no need of a distraction and—

The thought was interrupted when it was made plain that she had strayed too close to the action; Captain America had rolled into a fall and then rolled directly into her. She felt the hard ridges of his armor upon impact, forcing a low, painful grunt out of the pit of her stomach. June fell backward herself, knocking her head into the wooden railing; and though it hurt enough, she thanked her lucky stars it was soft with old age, instead of newly made and hard. The captain rolled off of her immediately, and for a man of his chivalrous reputation, she almost expected him to help her up. But battle called, too important for anything else right then.

Those fighting men were busy, entrenched in a battle of skill and stamina, all of them probably worn down from the mess of a conflict that had occurred earlier, but none of them willing to give in. That left June alone to finally notice that those noises coming from outside the window had resulted in bodies through the window, and her alone to face them.

At first, catastrophic thoughts of being forced to fight off someone like Black Widow or Thor flooded June’s head, but these men in black were no such terrifying agents. They were proverbial men in black, armed and armored, with thick protective glasses obscuring their features and red insignia too small to make out on their left breasts. Instead of heading directly toward the fighting as she might have expected, they focused immediately on her – not exactly something June wished to happen.

“Ms. Westlake,” The agent closest to her said, trying too hard to sound soothing and friendly. The sound of her last name froze her completely, and she wished she could see through the glasses to their eyes. “June. Please come with us. We only want to talk.”

June doubted that – they had guns held at the ready, after all – she slowly shook her head at them, feeling cold sweat gather at the small of her back to soak Buck’s shirt.

This time, the man’s words seemed much more focused and commanding, and the sound of their boots on the wooden floor, coming closer, was almost all she could hear. “Governor Westlake,” A meaningful pause, “Your father is looking for you, June. He wants you to come home.”

They must have known, absolutely, that she would never, ever consent willingly to go with them. June stared down the black clad agents, four of them, and felt much like a deer caught in the sightline of a hunter. Tension built to a razor edge in the space between them, all of them wondering how fast it could be crossed before finally, one of the agents decided to try.

An agent lunged at her, a full body leap that caught at the loose legs of her sweatpants until she was able to rip herself out of the man’s grip and jump from the pot into the fire. It probably wasn’t the greatest idea to run directly into the middle of a battle between a highly trained spy, a super soldier, and a super assassin – too many ‘supers’ in that equation to mean anything good for her  – June did it anyway, and gladly. If confronting the known element meant getting away from the agents in black who wanted to take her back to her father, then that was exactly what she was going to do.

Someone’s arm caught her directly in the nose and she was glad that at least it wasn’t Buck’s metal arm – that would have hurt much more. A pair of hands, familiar and mismatched, pulled her at the last second out of the way of Captain America’s shield, and she glimpsed the soldier’s startled face as he tried unsuccessfully  to reverse the momentum of the heavy shield to avoid her. A third hand, unexpected and oddly calloused, caught one of her arms and tried to pull her away from Buck, and he did not react very well to that.

June heard something snap in a particularly stomach curdling way, and shuddered, hugging closer to the only one she knew in the room. She felt Buck’s nose brush the curve of her forehead, and could see just over his shoulder that the others had backed off warily, watching with weapons at the ready. Behind them was the one bold Hydra agent, the one who had charged her, while the other three, too, watched cautiously. In a split second move, the archer loosed an arrow almost directly into the closest agent’s head and then returned his attention to them.

“кукла,” Buck’s voice was harsh from exertion and he sounded angry, like she was a dog that had disobeyed its master. Another flood of language that she could not understand, and beneath all the adrenaline and fear June felt angry and indignant in the chaos.

“They’re going to take me back.” She sought the eyes of the lead agent over Buck’s shoulder, whispering harshly and holding the stare. “They’ll take me back.”

Cradling the waitress against his side, Buck could not see her face – could not look for emotions in her eyes that he might be able to pick out – but he still understood. Every single part of him recognized, comprehended, innately, the terror of going back. For him, back to ice, back to labs, back to dark rooms and doctors. For her… He didn’t know yet what she feared returning to.

But he understood.  And he would stop it.

* * *

 

_the present_

Claire’s aunt was a nurse. Claire’s mother was a nurse. Her grandmother  and great-aunt were nurses, and her sister was in nursing school. She liked it that way – there was a sense of continuance and tradition among the women of her family. They made jokes together about how they were the real doctors, and there was never a lack of jobs for nurses who wanted work.

It had to be said though, that there were some nights in which things were, frankly, boring. Sure, it was nice to work in a well-funded, high-tech facility like StarkMed – occasional research projects and pre-admitted, high-need patients from the ground up to her floor, the 7th. And the Avengers research and medical facility above them all on floors 8 to 10, to which approval was elusively hard to get. Still, there was something to be said for the adrenaline of a big city emergency room.

Where were the pocket knives sticking out of eye sockets? Where were the vacationing pregnant women in unexpected but excited labor?

She’d filed the same paper three times in the last two hours, and the orderlies with their nighttime med deliveries were giving her petulant glances on every circuit. Kelly, one of the other nurses, was staring at a computer screen a few stations down with a distinct glaze over her features. Maybe-

Bright letters flashed over every screen available, and a stern sounding voice came over the PA. “Initiate protocol. King Joffrey is in the building. King Joffrey is in the building.”

In the one brief moment in which it took Claire to remember that, ‘King Joffrey is in the building.’ Was code for, ‘Serious Security Breach Lock That Fucker Down Now,’ all the doors slid shut with a thud and Iron Man flew through the far wall.

He waved at her.

A moment later, Dr. Banner – nice guy – darted through the opening and ran for one of the emergency exits. It wasn’t that he was running in fear, she thought, but more that he was desperate for something. From underneath the nurses’ station, she opened her mouth to yell to him that the door was locked down at the same moment the handle snapped off in his hand.

Hm. 

Some younger patients in the farthest rooms were beginning to cry, and Claire was just glad that they were out of harm’s way – so far.  But they, and the rest of the patients, would have to be evacuated sooner or later, and she did not relish that chaos. Out of thin air, Black Widow appeared, crouching on top of their counter and taking their stock in seconds. She faced the open, gaping hole in the wall and seemed to be waiting for something.

The answer to what Black Widow was waiting for came through the wall just a moment later: it was the patient they had rushed to the 8th floor in the early morning hours – a man with a metal arm that sent alarm bells ringing throughout Claire’s head. Shadowed eyes and long dark hair, dust smeared and grimacing, he looked ridiculously terrifying in spite of the backless hospital gown. In one hand he held what looked like the sharp edge of a broken metal rolling table, and there was blood on his hand.

The man stopped, his eyes passing over Claire, passing over Kelly, to land directly on the Black Widow. They held eye contact for a long time, while Iron Man cursed and complained in the background but generally held back, and the nurses wondered separately what kind of past the two spies might have between them.

There was a charge, old and electric, that snaked across the floor between them. Their bodies knew each other, their minds were acquainted, and narrative linked them together. At that moment though, it hardly seemed like a friendly one – like he was challenging her, ‘Stop me if you think you can.’

Just when it seemed like the action would come to a head, just when Black Widow’s finger itched on the trigger of her gun, when the patient was walking towards them and he –

He was—he was picking up the patient roster, flipping through it briefly, and ignoring them completely before turning down one of the side halls.

* * *

 

_35 hours, 30 minutes ago_

“How is this going to help things?” June was kneeling in an old bathtub, gripping the grimy edge, and looking at Buck like he was crazy. But maybe he was.

They’d taken the opportunity to slip out of sight when the Hydra agents had gone for the offensive, firing upon the Avengers team members and consequently giving their mutual targets an escape route. Well, more like a way to slip down the rickety stairs to another old room, with bunk beds this time, where Buck had promptly ushered her into the old claw foot. Her back and head were aching, Buck’s shoulder had not stopped bleeding around the protruding arrow head, and it was far too risky to rush outside and risk being caught by any others lying in wait.

June didn’t hold much hope Captain America and Hawkeye wouldn’t find them, only a few flights of stairs and hallways away, but she kept her fingers crossed that a brief respite would give Buck the chance to call on whatever reserves he needed to get them out. Knowing that her governor of a father was actively searching for her revived unnerving, difficult memories that she did not need to fight through at that particular moment. Memories that were colder than the rain outside, that left her shivering and quiet.

Buck’s hand landed on her shoulder, warm but a little unsure; after a moment he hesitantly stepped into the tub and crouched down at her side – June could see Buck fighting through the Winter Soldier, the man that had breakfast with her and laughed about being in ‘the pictures.’

She imagined it must have been particularly painful for him to move his biological arm, but he placed it slowly, hesitantly, around her shoulders, not hugging her closer, just resting there. The warmth was welcome, but mostly June appreciated the silent understanding, the loyalty.

They were June and Buck Against the World, after all.

Then the bomb hit.

* * *

 

_the present_

June woke up and found herself blinded by light, pierced through with the full knowledge of what had happened to them, of what Buck had done for her, of what news might be awaiting her. There was no grace period; the comfort of hazy thoughts and oblivion denied to her. June was asleep – June was awake – that was all.

It was a visceral sort of pain, to feel the frank impact of knowledge shoved upon her so that she felt curled over and knocked down even when lying in a hospital bed. There were soldiers, assassins, agents, archers. She remembered in sharply broken fragments the noise and chaos like a fuzzy television, the dust and the coughing and hoarse shouting. The scent of betadine in her nose and the feeling of being strapped onto something while her eyes refused to focus.

They were still a little fuzzy in that hospital room, details hard to come by, and her eyelids felt unpleasantly gritty when she rubbed at them. Slowly things came into focus: the IV in her right hand, the dryness of her throat, the beeping of the machines, the pain in her chest and legs.

There was a loud noise upstairs, a roar and a crash, and June finally saw Captain America, mostly de-armored but still looking particularly stern and standing by her closed hospital room door. He appeared to be listening, listening hard like what he heard would avenge several lifetimes of pain. Like, June thought, he was looking for any sign that a man that had once been his best friend was looking for him.

It sounded phantom-like, but still clear. Buck wasn’t looking for Captain Steve Rogers, he was looking for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Стой, где вы находитесь. Пребывание за меня. = Stay where you are. Stay behind me. 
> 
> Кукла = Doll.
> 
> Man, I had a hell of a time writing this chapter. I've re-written it a couple of times, and I'm still not sure if it's good, so you'll just have to let me know if it lives up to the usual standards. Worked mostly on it at work, when I had a few moments of downtime here or there, so I'm not sure if it suffered for that. Well, just yell at me if it sucks.
> 
> Another year, another convention. It's San Diego Comic-Con time again boys and girls! I'll try to have another chapter out before I go, but no guarantees, I'm particularly busy between now and then. Fingers crossed it will be an amazing year!
> 
> Come bug me on tumblr if you'd like, my handle there is also latemarch, so I'm easy to find, at least. I'll hopefully post stuff from SDCC if anyone's interested? Probably not.


	11. i've killed the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The prison built for the likes of Hulk and Loki finds another use. Colonel Rhodes proves what an exceptional human being he is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I didn’t get a chapter out before Comic-Con. Oops. Sorry everyone! I tried to write while I was down there, too, but I ended up getting pretty seriously ill in the middle of it all. It’s terribly difficult to write a story when you’re trying not to pass out in your hotel room, you know?
> 
> I think this chapter is a little bit shorter than usual, for which I also apologize. I had originally started to write it in the usual format, going back and forth from June and Buck, but nothing seemed to really cooperate. In the end things felt better and much, much smoother when I decided to split them into two chapters. Next one will be June’s turn.
> 
> I also spent a lot of time deciding between Rhodey and Thor for the chapter – wrote both a Thor version and a Rhodey version. I love me some Thor, but in the end it just felt more relatable and more believably emotional with Rhodey in the boot with Buck. If you want to see the Thor version… let me know and I’ll see about putting it up as a separate fic.

“Hold him still! Hold him still!”

“Fuck! The stitches are tearing!”

* * *

 

Buck was at odds with the world, confused and dizzy though the state of his wounds told him that it had only been a day, half of one, since he’d last been able to think clearly. The parade of memories that he could line up were most disturbingly similar to his time with Hydra, especially as he fought back against those trying to hold him down and everything washed in blood. Winter Soldier counted out ten voices around him as a bright light shone in his eyes, and he could only recall a second doctor entering his hospital room, syringe in hand, and then a vicious and angry search through beige corridors and hospital beds.

Had he heard June’s voice answering his call? No, only silence and the crumble of rubble.

The memory played out like a silent movie, slowing resolving itself into fragmented ribbons of film: a new doctor with injection ready; Banner’s body changing shape; a blur of combat. Like he’d looked into the sun, his vision slowly cleared from the center outward, and it was almost as if he could feel himself coming back into his own body.

And the scene materialized in front of him, all sharply lined and suddenly loud as New York traffic in rush hour. An alarm sounded from another room, and a mix of people wearing either black tactical armor or white lab coats peered at him from around the room. A couple of them lay scattered about the room, some others seemed to clutch oddly angled limbs to their bodies. He could hear the harsh panting of his own breath timing perfectly to that of the others. A round machine, taller than most men might be, took up too much space and blocked his view of a possible exit.

One of the tacticals started to inch around the machine, and though he said that he meant no harm, his gun stayed drawn. Winter soldier eyed the machine and estimated the number of additional units it could be hiding, stayed silent. It wasn’t for him to speak, but to learn and then attack.

 “Now hold on a minute there,  _amigo_ ,” The agent was an older man, attempting to lessen the tension by using familiar terms. His voice held the faintest trace of South America. “Let’s all take a breath here, take a step back and calm down. I don’t know what you think is happening, but we are only trying to help you. Okay?”

_Успокойся, актив. Мы только помочь вам. И тогда вы помочь нам, да?*_

The agent had paused to watch for comprehension. “You know what that machine is?”

Winter Soldier did not answer, and cursed how they all tracked his wary glance at the unfamiliar machine.

“That’s an MRI scanner.” The agent gestured to the machine with one hand, not taking his eyes off of the asset, and he had the kind of calm, matter-of-fact voice that would climb far in an agency like SHIELD. “We want to use it to see if there are any implants in your brain. Anything that might injure you or force you to injure others. You see?”

_Мы только делаем это, чтобы помочь вам, актив. Если мы вытереть их, воспоминания не будет делать вам никакого вреда.*_

Winter Soldier was uncomfortably aware of every bead of ice cold sweat sliding between his shoulder blades, and it took sudden effort to concentrate and to understand everything the agent was saying. There was too much static, too much panic brought on by all this stimulation: in his nose was the co-mingled, sickly sweet scent of copper blood and machinery oil; in his ears the prickly, hot sound of welding. He narrowed his eyes and focused on the spot between the agent’s eyes, sniper’s focus.

“That it,  _mijo_.” The man nodded encouragingly. “My name is Agent Ed Gonzalez*, okay? Everything will work itself out, just let the doctor go.”

Buck looked down to see the rounded head of a struggling, sweating, white-coated doctor by the throat with his weaponized arm.

 _‘Everything will work itself out, Bucky. Don’t worry about me. You’re taking all the stupid with you, anyway.’_  The memory formed with sudden pressure against the front of his skull, Steve sitting on his bed, in that little apartment they’d shared, the night before he shipped out.

He refused to let the doctor go until the gun was holstered.

* * *

 

For the third day in a row, James Barnes, code name Winter Soldier, sat in a bot. A reinforced metal and glass structure of a boot, to be more precise.

His biological arm was clenched at his side, held down by a thick cuff that ran the length of his forearm and resisted any attempt to slip or break it. His metal arm was held in a kind of clamp, doubly restrained by machinery that had ‘Stark’ emblazoned on the side and by some kind of magnetics. He was held against the back of a chair that was meant to force him to sit upright but instead bowed him backward, and his back ached like fire from hours in it. There were restraints around his ankles too, but they were too tight and his feet felt tingly and painful from lack of blood flow. His back itched, his head pounded, his body throbbed where they had stitched open wounds back up again – and for the first time in a long time, he felt honest, gut clenching anger.

It was probably better for them that he was so thoroughly restrained. There was rage below, inside him, simmering and low burning, but it was there, and they were right to feel threatened.

For two days prior, his restraints had been two track bracelets, both presumably equipped with some sort of disabling agent should he have attempted to slip the noose tightening around his neck. Murmurs began to circulate, whispers of examining his metal arm, and on the third day he was strapped down. The scientists and soldier-types who’d done it had avoided his darkly direct stars, like drivers trying to avoid black ice that they couldn’t quite see.

Only Steve and Natalia, throughout each of their innumerable visits, stared back from behind the glass. The latter was no longer the impenetrable Soviet asset he’d once known, and he could no longer get a read on her through the impassivity stamped on her face. The former looked tired, and resigned, and sad.

Buck thought that maybe he, maybe the Winter Soldier should care that Captain America was sad. Images of their childhood together and of their time during the war were projected on the walls for hours at a time, dredging for remnants of a young man in the 1940s, long ago dead. But that connection was no longer whole, it had been ripped apart by doctors, by electrical impulses, by the deaths of men he’d once known, by literal decades of plastic mouth guards stuffed between his teeth. If it  _ever_  grew back, it would take much more than just three days’ time.

Steve held the door open for the doctor from earlier, Banner, and for Natalia; the former two looked supremely uncomfortable with the stale smell of sweat and blood permeating the room. As Steve was a soldier and Banner a physician, Buck could only surmise that it was the notion of the sweat and blood being his ow n that set them off. Natalia’s face remained, as it had for as long as he could remember, empty. Banner took his eyes off of the former Soviet just long enough to murmur to the others, “We’re just waiting for Tony.”

“Then what am I doing here?” It was one of the soldier types, just stepping into the boot with his face full of guarded, military reserve. He was tall, handsome, well-built without being physically imposing. A less observant man might have considered him to be a small threat when in the room with a super soldier, a government spy, and a shapeshifter, but Buck was not unobservant. Quite the opposite, and he could see the training and skill in everything the newcomer did.

Someday, some far thinking part of him decided, he’d either be on the lookout for this man’s attack, or be glad to have this man at his back.

“Colonel Rhodes.” Steve reached over to shake the newcomer’s hand, and the way they held themselves was painfully similar, painfully familiar. “Glad to have you.” And Steve looked it too, like he was happy to hand over part of his burden to someone else.

Rhodes smiled, and then put his hands in his pockets. It was clearly an attempt at looking non-threatening for Buck’s sake. “Cap. Dr. Banner. Romanoff. Nice to see you here again. I thought I might be of assistance.” There was hardly a moment of pause before he added, “Oh, and could you please tell Wilson to high-tail it back here? That Foster’s assistant nearly jumped me in the elevator and I don’t much feel like another awkward conversation with her.”

Buck saw Nat’s eyes flick up to search for humor in the other man’s face, almost protectively, and apparently found it because she shifted in her spot and shrugged. “He’s here, brought a friend with him. Hill has them debriefing.”

“Lang, right? He’s been asked to consult with Tony on the machinery, hasn’t he?” Colonel Rhodes kept his hands in his pockets and slowly walked towards Buck as he spoke, looking stern and critical.

The slightest sound of working machinery  filled the room like a rolling fog, and all at once the others looked at him – no, not at him, at his arm. The need to slip his restraints and fight his way out amplified with each step the Colonel took, Buck’s body sliding into an assassin’s version of panic mode without his consent and before he was aware enough to attempt to control it. It felt like those first early days after the fall of the Triskelion, sweaty and nervous and hiding in the deep, dark quiet of long forgotten bolt holes. Every smile, every cup of coffee, every early morning breakfast he ate while under June’s watch even when his stomach was rolling from a long and trying night – they all seemed to be slipping away.

His fleshy fist felt sweaty and prickled with pain like a palm full of splinters as Colonel Rhodes came to a stop maybe two feet away.

Rhodes was a soldier, through and through. The leftover lines of humor around his eyes and mouth, and the casual way he posed himself were only a thin cover for the immutable, dyed-in-the-wool officer within, decades later and Buck could the same things in this man that he saw in his fellow 107th recruits, familiar and frightening all at once.  Even money that he had at least one weapon hidden on his person somewhere, and it was obvious that he’d placed himself as a sort of first defense for the others, should the monster they were caging suddenly burst out of control.

Three days could not possibly have worn through seventy years of Hydra coercion and medical experiments and the time and again forcible erasing of his very self, so Colonel Rhodes was either a very good soldier or a very good actor.

For it seemed as if he could look inside and understand at least some small portion of the utter mire that was Buck’s emotions. There was sympathy there, and there should never have been sympathy. Buck had killed countless men and women and children.

Soldiers.

Agents.

Spies.

Politicians.

Generals who saw too little.

Shoemakers who saw too much.

And millionaires. Millionaires too.

All of them, dead by his hand and appearing to him in the guise of and enemy of Hydra. Even as he hardly knew his own mind or his own organization, he knew enough to brace his metal arm against Howard Stark’s sports car, while those inside slowly became aware of what happened, and push it over the edge of the cliff. Knew enough to put a bullet through Gilmore Hodge’s eyes.

Part of Buck, Winter Soldier, thought that James Rhodes was a fool for feeling sympathy, for being taken in the mask of the ice riddled victim. Part of him, Bucky, was hurt and angry and desperately clutching at his own pieces, would accept no sympathy from the country that had let this happen to him. A third part, Buck maybe, wanted every other dissenting part of himself to cry out and reach for the comforting contact, for the support, as he did.

Rhodes made the obvious decision to only look at that third part. And there was sympathy. “What do you need, son? I’m here to help you too.”

* * *

 

Buck rolled his shoulders. He felt strangely nervous, like he’d done something wrong.

He could see inside the people that he’d come to be near, had stopped in front of the little New York sandwich shop while the Agents that guarded him (two at each arm, several snipers on the rooftops, plainclothesmen on the street, all with guns ready for his back) turned their heads to speak into tiny microphones by their jaw. So small and nearly unnoticeable, the tech was almost certainly from Stark, and the notion that Howard’s eyes were following him even then set his teeth on edge.

As he watched, someone emerged from the back of the shop, from the bathroom by the way they were rubbing their damp hands on their jeans. Looking at Tony Stark was like seeing a ghost from the past. Would have stalled him outside that deli door for so much longer, if it wasn’t for the sudden gaze of a waitress.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Calm down, asset. We only help you. And then you help us, yes.
> 
> * We only do this to help you, asst. If we wipe them away, memories will do you no harm.
> 
> * Gonzalez' son.  
> I’m not quite sure how this chapter turned out, given that I struggled with it for so long, but hopefully you enjoyed it. Hopefully Buck’s emotions came out as relatively genuine – I’m particularly worried about that last thought sequence with Rhodey in the boot.
> 
> Anywho, tell me if you liked it. Tell me if you hated it. Tell me if you want to see the T hor version of this chapter. Also, I’m tempted to write out Rhodey’s interaction with Darcy? Thoughts? I’d like to hear ‘em.


	12. supervillain with a tragic backstory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this episode of The Waitress, we finally find out what our tragic heroine has gone through in her past life, and Tony Stark orders like, eleven burgers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'mmmmmmmmmm not dead yet.
> 
> No, I'm not.
> 
> Anyway, here's the next chapter. I'm too entranced by the newest episodes of Agent Carter to say much more right now exactly. Go Peggy go!

“Can we just…” June paused and looked down at her hands, folded and clenched tightly in her lap. They were hidden from her interviewer by the edge of the conference table, but she hoped there was no one spying on her white knuckles from some hidden camera. “It’s so stuffy in here. Maybe we could go somewhere else?”  
  
They were sitting in a long, thin room – empty but for table, rolling chairs, and a drop down projection system that the last user hadn’t bothered to put away. The man sitting on the opposite side of what she considered a sort of war zone looked pointedly past her to the set of wide open windows. They let in New York City wind and smog, calls from the street below, and the far away wails of taxis, and they’d been opened at her request only an hour ago. Because, as she’d said: stuffy.  
  
His second glance, equally and precisely pointed, took in the heavy Stark Industries sweatshirt that had been given to her nearly thirty minutes earlier when it had looked like she was going to shiver off of her chair from the cutting NYC wind.  
  
Phil Coulson, Director, SHIELD agent, Man in Black, Jackbooted Thug, whatever you wanted to call him, had been particularly accommodating to her so far, but she had a feeling that was his general modus operandi. Lure you in with acquiescence, with charming and pleasant and helpful direction, until he had enough information and time to help you fall over whatever cliff you were heading towards.  
  
Maybe it was the long pane of frosted glass that paralleled the whole room and made it feel all too much like a police interrogation. Maybe it was the possibility of an untold number of watchers behind that shield, making her feel exposed and unhappily vulnerable. Maybe she just felt more comfortable exposing the tender parts of her past in bustling restaurants full of patrons. Hadn’t there been something in The Great Gatsby about how large parties were so much more intimate than the small ones?  
  
_“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”_

Phil stood up, a sigh weaving its way out of his mouth, and took a moment to tug at and straighten the suit jacket he wore. He looked contemplative and June wondered if she’d finally overstepped her SHIELD issued welcome. That was _not_ an eventuality she had yet prepared herself for - that nice agent from before, the one that drove her over from the hotel room she was staying, or rather, held at, had made it seem like she might be welcome or encouraged to stay for awhile longer.

Would her job at the diner still be available by the time she got back to it? The answer was not one she cared to ponder for too long right then.

The Jackbooted Thug in question was scrubbing a hand over the back of his neck in a gesture that stuck out as an uncharacteristic and put upon gesture, like an attempt to convince her that he really was human. “You’re absolutely right, Ms. Westlake. Maybe we can find somewhere more comfortable to have our little chat.”

June suspected that there was no such thing as a ‘little chat’ when you were facing the Director of SHIELD. Or of what was left of it.

“If you’ll come with me, I think I know of a good place.” He’d come around the table, and was holding a hand out to her in invitation. June took it, and pushed back the thought that his hand felt nothing like Buck’s, with calluses in all the wrong places.

Buck, whom June hadn’t seen since the incident, three days prior. After hearing him calling her name, back in Stark’s hospital complex, he’d disappeared for all intents and purposes. That moment seemed ten years ago and a world away, she thought, stepping around half-pushed in chairs. It felt obvious, when staring Captain America in the eye and gripping her bed sheets until her fingers ached, that Buck would come for her - but the calls had silenced almost as soon as they’d started, and he hadn’t come for her yet.

_‘Another person to be abandoned by.’_ The thought had haunted her the past few nights, and the longer he stayed away, the harder it was to deny the truth of it. In those old apartments, it had seemed like there wouldn’t be anything that could separate them for long, like there was an understanding, a mutuality between them that would keep them connected no matter what happened. Buck would come for her. He would.

But he hadn’t. At least not yet. _‘Maybe never.’_

If Director Coulson knew anything about Buck, and he probably did because well - Director - he said nothing, even as he lead her out of the boardroom with a polite hand on her elbow and a comment about feeling hungry for coffee and waffles.

They’d barely exited the room when, of all the people she least expected to see, Iron Man showed up. Tony Stark popped, enthusiastically and charismatically, out of the tiny observation room directly next to the conference room. The casual observer might not have noticed that he quietly gestured for others in the observation room to ‘stay back,’ but June did and it made her feel even more self-conscious of her time being ‘interviewed.’ Dressed in expensive sweatpants and one of those sweat-wicking athletic shirts, it all seemed so casual as he fell into step on her other side, but the situation was clearly anything but.

“I’m starving, and waffles sound A. Mazing.” He looked friendly enough, a self-serving grin on his face as he slung an arm around her neck. June had the feeling that his friendly half-hug was a signal that he was very definitely not going to be letting Coulson just walk off with her.

The Director stopped dead while Stark kept going, because that had very definitely been his exact plan. He had a polite but firm hand on her elbow and used it to haul her back towards him. “Mr. Stark, I’m afraid that we’re going to have to continue this conversation in private.”

“I fully agree.”

“Private, as in, only myself and Ms. Westlake.”

“I fully do not agree.”

“Mr. Stark-” Coulson began, polite and insistent. But it was not much of a match for the intensity that blazed from the core of Anthony Stark.

“No.” Tony stepped closer, and the open amiability of his face melted away. “No, Coulson, no more secrets. This whole thing affects my team. It affects me, and Pep, and everyone in this building. And while Captain Spangle Ass is downstairs playing at memory lane, I’m going to be around to hear this whole mess out. I don’t push you often,” The government agent opposite him snorted, “But I’m pushing you now.”

Some evaluating glances were traded before Coulson sighed, beginning to relent. “I don’t think that’s wise.”

“Do I look like I give a damn about what’s wise?”  
  


* * *

 

“Of course, you two are here.”

June looked between the two people leaning against the diner counter – one a sandy haired man with bandages on his jawline and a bright purple hearing aid in, the other a red haired, snakelike woman who watched June with a gaze that reminded her of imminent peril, of having to watch her steps too closely for comfort. Neither one of them were familiar, but both of them had clearly been waiting for her party, such as it was.

Of any of them, Coulson seemed the most put out, though in only a moment he sighed, appearing resigned. The black clad SHIELD agents that had tracked them down the street and into the diner twitched not a muscle, while Mr. Stark, Tony now because he’d already corrected her twice in five minutes, smirked and nudged her with a hip. June didn’t know if he meant for her to do something or to know who these people even were, but instead she held her tongue and crossed her arms more firmly over her stomach.

“We want a story.” The man said to the Director, the playful words belied by the way he stared directly at June. The woman didn’t add to his announcement, but her smooth, foggy eyes echoed the sentiment.

Director Coulson had a way of saying, “Let’s find a seat, shall we?” that sounded a lot like, _‘Why the hell not.’_ A courteous hand at the small of her back and an outstretched arm allowed him to guide her into exactly the booth he wanted without looking anything but exceedingly polite.

June didn’t know if he knew where she’d worked before and had chosen this place as a reminder, or if it had just been an unexpected coincidence. The booths were all clothed in dull red vinyl, the tabletops an old cream formica. The menu was written out on chalkboards nailed to stained wooden overhands, the prices all covered over and re-written one or twenty times in the last sixty years. The floor was scratched and foot-worn with red and white linoleum tile, and the air was filled with the sounds of knives on plates and big band music.

There was a waitress standing next to their table in jeans and a t-shirt, an apron stamped with the diner logo. She looked bored, she looked tired –she held out some laminated menus and promised to come back with water for five.

The blonde man pulled a chair over from another table so he could flank the endcap while June scooted into the far back corner. Coulson’s eyes drilled into June, unassumingly intense and firmly expectant in a way that made it clear that there was no way out. She couldn’t stop, couldn’t bow out, couldn’t take a pass. And if he hadn’t pinned her down with a gaze that felt like an anvil on her chest, Tony Stark slinging himself into the seat next to her at the table and casually leaving one hand on the table while he leaned back against the seat blocked any and every exit.

“This place does a great veggie ‘wich with sprouts and hummus, if you’d believe it.” Director Coulson was saying, exactly when June had expected him to demand a story from her. “I know Duane and Jo’s doesn’t look like the kind of place, but it is.”

June nodded, feeling how the menu was getting slippery with nerves and clammy palms. She sat rigid, pressed into the corner by the back window, half blinded by the sunlight coming in from the front, and wished to god that she was at work and not at the mercy of these strangers. _‘Maybe,’_ June decided some minutes later. _‘Maybe making me wait for them to order and go through this whole routine is some kind of test or psychological torture. Maybe they think it’ll break me into spilling it all.’_

It probably would, actually, because waiting for Tony Stark to decide if he really wanted to order six of the fourteen available sandwiches and whether or not it would be too much trouble to drag another table over to theirs was near interminable. If she had to wait for him to eat all of that before things got down to brass tacks again, she’d probably scream.

“Alright June Westlake, I think we have some time hear you now.” She snapped her head up at the sound of not Coulson’s voice, but the woman’s. “Why don’t you start by telling us how you met James Buchanan Barnes.”

She needed a huge breath to force the words out finally. “At work. It was while I was working as a waitress.”

“At Gil’s Diner.” Blonde man stated. He was watching her lips closely enough despite the hearing aid.

June nodded. “Yes, he came in during my early swing shift one morning. I thought he was a veteran just home from the war.” Immediately, she felt Tony’s watching her from the side, close enough to feel body heat and intensity and a swirl of emotion she had no context for. “He seemed lonely, and sad.”

They asked her if she’d told anyone about the man she’d met. “No, I don’t know anyone to tell.”

Where was her family? “Back home, in Nevada.”

When had she last talked to them? “Years ago.”

Where they in any way connected to Hydra? “No, not to the best of my knowledge.”

Had he done anything that had frightened her? “No, he didn’t.” __  
  
They didn’t need to know about that hand on her wrist.

How had she-

Director Coulson interrupted the other agents with a hand gesture that, while friendly enough, was decisive. “Ms. Westlake, I think we’d all like to hear your story from the beginning, in your own words. Tell us how you ended up in New York, and how you came to know Sergeant Barnes.”

“Director Agent,” Tony had a French fry half way to his mouth, but was letting it dangle. “I think we’ll need to make room for one more.”

June looked up and out to the front of the diner, and wondered immediately why she hadn’t felt his presence earlier.

Buck stood just inside the doorway, his flesh hand braced against the nearest booth seat, his mechanized hand hidden just out of sight behind one hip. He looked, in a word, horrible. Paler than usual, with fatigue evident in his face as if he’d run a constant marathon for near a week. It was a relief at first, that he was studying the others at the crowded table with her, but then their eyes met and a balm began to wash over her.

To the side, she sensed that the sudden appearance was less welcome than she might have considered it. Tony was back to eating, slurping down a soda and sweeping up piles of ketchup and BBQ sauce with his fries – it was all an act though – he was so much the study of relaxation and indifference that it could not possibly have been genuine. June knew little enough about the Howling Commandos and the old Sergeant Barnes, but she knew the basic facts as any other who had taken high school history would.

She remembered belatedly that Buck – or James or Bucky – had worked with Tony’s father, Howard, during the war; and Tony’s reaction made it clear, at least to her, that there was an issue buried deep, one she wasn’t privy to.

“Glad you’re well enough to join us, Sergeant Barnes.” Coulson was volunteering as the official welcome wagon, it seemed, and June distinctly remembered some guards talking a few days back about the Director’s collection of Howling Commandos trading cards. “Why don’t you take a seat?”

Buck didn’t say anything – he moved silently and efficiently to stand in front of Tony and waited – for a seat – it seemed. After a moment of awkwardness, Tony’s shoulders tightened. “Are you friggin kidding me.”

He set his burger down and stood up out of his seat in a way that pointedly forced Buck to step back, then moved out of the way with a sarcastic sweep of his arm. The others watched the exchange intently, perhaps looking for signs of impending violence, but said nothing. Still moving silently while the rest of burger joint continued on obliviously, Buck slid into the bench seat next to June, settling in so close that his hip brushed her thigh, and promptly turned his back to her.

June shrugged as far back into the corner as she could, faced the broad expanse of Buck’s back, and tried to tamp down on feeling hurt and slighted for the briefest moment. It was the open comprehension on the face of the sandy haired man across the table that clued her in. Buck had cornered her so that he faced any possible attack head on – her back was to the wall, there was a window to her right, and he had placed himself between her and any other access points.

In response, she shifted one hand beneath the table where the others couldn’t see, curling two fingers through the closest belt loop on his jeans. If he felt her movement, he gave no indication but for turning his head back toward her the smallest fraction of an inch. A beat later, his flesh hand moved to cup her knee under the table, his touch so light and hesitant that it almost wasn’t there.

“Well Sergeant Barnes, we were just about to hear from Ms. Westlake on how she came to join you and by proxy, us. Ms. Westlake, let’s start from the beginning, shall we?”

Everyone saw the involuntary shiver that June fought, clearly uncomfortable about her past but compelled by the sheer power of the government agents sitting across from her. No one saw how two of her fingers peeked over the edge of Buck’s jeans and pressed against the small of his back, for support.

* * *

 

  
Upon returning to the tower some time later, Buck expected to be promptly deposited back inside what some of the scientists had fondly called the ‘boot,’ and instead found himself – thoroughly chaperoned, of course – in a lower level common area full of expensive couches and a well-stocked bar station used for guests and liaisons.

June sat across from him, arms folded across her stomach, looking faintly sick and as if she didn’t know what to do with herself. Colonel Rhodes sat to the left with a healthy glass of lager, and Samuel Wilson, the Falcon, was to her right and casually thumbing through an Us Weekly. Buck suspected that as the most usual appearing of all the Avengers and associates, they’d been picked to flank her as if to lend a sense of normalcy and comfort. Although the warrior Thor, the ever-injured Agent Barton, and one Dr. Banner sat in the room with them, they’d all given the frazzled woman a generous amount of space.

Captain America, well, Stevie, who was perched at the very edge of a lounge chair, spent the first fifteen minutes or so describing the adjacent suite of rooms that were being allocated to Buck so that they could be close to each other.  
  
The prospect of being near to Stevie again made Buck’s stomach hurt. Made his head hurt. Made the gears in his arm shift and whirr furiously. The memories and thoughts and past life in his head had been rent and burnt away till they were almost unrecognizable, and Buck feared how much disappointment he would bring to the Captain’s life when he failed time and again to remember a time long past.

The longer Stevie talked about his new space and accommodations, the more Buck found himself staring across the coffee table at June. He had a place to exist, to maybe live. Where would she live? What would she do? She couldn’t go back to that diner and tiny, broken apartment, could she?

“Buck?” The questioning tone snapped him out of his thoughts. “Did you hear me?” Steve’s face was painfully earnest even as he tried desperately to hide how much he _wanted_. The very thought of trying to live up to those expectations set his teeth on edge – he was done molding himself to the expectations of others, even when they were only trying to do what was best for him.

“Bathroom?” He stood up suddenly, looking for a way out, for a moment of quiet where there weren’t so many people watching him so intently.

A ceiling panel above them lit up expectantly, and the soft, British voice of Tony Stark’s AI filtered through the speakers. “I can show you the fastest route to the nearest single occupancy restroom, if you’re ready, Sergeant Barnes.”

Everyone stopped to look at Steve, as if he might suddenly need the bathroom too and would volunteer to come with. But perhaps the Captain was more self-aware of the pressure he was putting on his childhood friend than previously assumed, and was trying to give the other man more space. “Please. I’ll wait here for you.”

“If you’ll follow me.” JARVIS was the AI’s name, and as he spoke a series of lit ceiling panels began to travel down the nearest hallway.

JARVIS took him past several offices and secured sections in what was probably the most heavily fortified area of the building. Most of it was unremarkable, all sleek slate gray with dark carpeting that transitioned to dark stone once they reached a section with locked lab areas on either side. Less likely to spread contaminants and easier to identify oncoming footsteps.

“Do you think that was really the entire story?” Tony Stark, sounding dubious, who had disappeared shortly after they had returned to the tower.

“I think that was the entire story as she knew it.” Natalia Romanova’s voice was low and throaty, coming from behind a half-closed lab door. Buck stopped short of the entrance while JARVIS’ guiding lights kept moving without him.

The door opened onto a small, open ante-chamber where someone could de-vest themselves of anything they didn’t want to risk in a fire – a low, curved wall that opened into the larger lab and a couple of fire resistant cubbies that were currently empty. Buck crouched below the level of the wall on a floor mat that said, ‘Was there an explosion in here or are you just smokin’?’

“Oh come on. The girl gets sucked into one of those drug fueled power groups led by a man who hides her away, isolates her entire family and fucks her up for years, leaving her to perish – fucking perish for god’s sake – on the side of a freeway in the middle of nowhere with nothing, and you’re telling me you honestly believe that she has somehow managed to come out of this not a supervillain with a tragic backstory? I call bull.”

“The woman is a victim.” Natalia said sharply, and Buck knew Tony had struck a nerve whether he cared to or not.

“I remember when SHIELD had to deal with that group.” Tony pressed on, and Buck looked around the low wall to see that they were facing several projected screens full of newspaper articles and government records, and more importantly, away from him. “They didn’t find a damn bit of infrastructure behind the whole thing to support it – nothing. Someone had to have been supplying them with money to keep them going all that time. Had to.”

“You’re telling me you honestly believe that woman in there supplied the money? I call bull.” Natalia purposefully mimicked Stark’s earlier speech.

Two opposing documents were drawn to the front of the screens. One of them was a missing persons report, several years old and stamped in red with the word, ‘ARCHIVE’ in the top left corner. The other was a newspaper interview with the Governor Westlake of Nevada entitled, ‘Anniversary of a Missing Child: John Westlake shares his story.’ “No, but I think her family did. The question is whether or not she knew.” Tony paused a moment, as if waiting for the woman next to him to ask for clarification. When she didn’t, he pushed on anyway. “Look. Look at this: in the original missing persons report that we are technically not allowed to look but hello, I’m a Stark. Anyway, John Westlake clearly states in the report that he has no idea where his daughter is or where she has been taken. He says the same thing over and over again immediately following the abduction whenever possible and to whoever – whomever? – would listen.”

Buck scanned the documents as Natalia did, reading over and over the regurgitated reports about a broken back door and signs of a struggle. Appearing dissatisfied with the info as he was, she waved a hand at Tony to continue.

“But see here, this interview was published three years later and in one section, Westlake mentions that he has combed the entire Seattle area with no luck, he can’t find her. The reporter didn’t notice or was just crap and no one paid any attention to how he was suddenly naming a specific area.”

“The police files indicated nothing about Seattle.” Buck didn’t question how Natalia had already gone over all of the police files, and neither did Tony.

“Exactly!” Tony pulled up several more documents and began scanning them for a particular section. “Exactly.” When he didn’t find what he was looking for right away, he rubbed a hand over his distinctive facial hair. “JARVIS, what was my point again?”

The AI’s voice sounded distinctly put out. “I believe you are referring, sir, to the fact that the group in question was based out of Tacoma, Washington.”

Buck could hear Tony repeating himself as he slipped back out of the lab and into the hallway. Without JARVIS to lead him to his intended destination, he turned back toward the common area and needed no help finding his way back. June was where he had left her, as was Steve he noticed, and both of them watched him circle the back end of the room to take a seat at the bar behind the couches. June’s head was perfectly in his line of sight, and as Steve came over to sit next to him as de facto chaperone, Buck wondered what, exactly, the waitress had been sold for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you all have enjoyed this issue of The Waitress! I know it's been a long time coming and I hope that hasn't waned your enthusiasm too much! In the coming week or so, I believe that I will be going through the earlier chapters to make small edits - looking for logistical errors, spelling, etc. - but I wouldn't worry that they'll change so much that you have to go back and re-read.
> 
> Someone also very kindly asked to read the Thor version of Captain Rhodes' visit to Bucky in Chapter 11. You can read it on my Tumblr!
> 
> As usual tell me what you liked, and also what you disliked! Thank you!

**Author's Note:**

> Whelpers, that was it. I'll do my best to get more out soon and to figure out where this is going overall.
> 
> I hoped you liked it. If you did, tell me why. If you didn't, tell me why.
> 
> Please and thank you, of course.


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